\

The Fair Land of
Central America

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The Fair
of Central

Maurice de WalefFe

Translated by

Violette M. Montagu

Author of " Sophie Dawes, Queen of Chantilly," and Translator of
" Gambetta's Life and Letters "

Preface by
Sir A. Conan Doyle

With Twenty-four Illustrations from Photographs

London

John Long, Limited

Norris Street, Haymarket

MCMXI

Preface

WlNDLESHAM,

CROWBOROUGH,

SUSSEX.

October 24, 1909.

DEAR M. DE WALEFFE,

I did not reply sooner because I wanted to
read your book. I have just finished it and I think
it quite charming, very witty, instructive, and full
of interesting observations. I am entirely of your
opinion that you are the first author to write im-
partially about men and matters in those parts
of the world.

I fear that my opinion concerning the future of
Central America is worthless. But could I return
to earth a hundred years after my decease, my
first question would be : " What are the United
States doing ? " I like the people and the country,
but I don't feel at all sure about their future. At
the end of another hundred years, Germany,
France, and England will all be represented there
more or less ; but in the case of the United States,

7

Preface

we must remember that they represent forty-five
countries without a natural centrum ; and there
is always a possibility that some superior force
may come and dissolve the nation, either by
arousing the race-hatred of the West for the East,
or by future labour troubles between millionaires
and workmen. I hope this will not come about,
for I myself believe that the United States are a
force for good in this world ; but such an event is
always possible.

With sincere thanks, believe me, yours very
truly,

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

Contents

PAGE

THE AMERICAN PROBLEM . . . .13

THE ANTILLES AND VENEZUELA . . . .31

PANAMA ........ 55

COSTA RICA . , . . . . .117

JAMAICA AND CUBA . . . . . .162

MEXICO ........ 205

EPILOGUE . 268

List of Illustrations

e Author and his Wife rowing on the lagunes of Mexico Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

'rinidad. Women going to market . . . -34

[exico. The State Prison ... -34

[avana. Bird's-eye view ... -44

ic Maine, off Havana . . . . . .130

>ta Rica. Typical Banana Farm . . . .130

Jose1. Main Street. Milk-carriers and Ox-cart . .132

Rica. The Forest of Peralta . . . .132

[amaica. Street Scene in Port Royal . . . .162

:osta Rica. San Jose. Handling Coffee . .162

tort of Spain, Trinidad . . . . . .164

le house of the French Consul, Jamaica, ruined by the earth-
quake of 1 4th January, 1907 . . . .164

Railway Station on the Railway from Mexico to Vera Cruz . 192

>ta Rica. On the Prairies of Peralta . . . .192

Santiago. Bird's-eye view . . . . .198

Costa Rica. Military Band . . . . .198

A Bull-fight in Mexico. Entrance of the Cuadrilla . .210

Silver railing of Pilgrimage Church of Guadalupe . .212

Cathedral, Mexico . . . . . . .214

II

List of Illustrations

PACING PAGE

The first Automobile in Havana . . .218

An Automobile in a Mexican Village . . . .218

A Bull-fight, Mexico ...... 226

A Bull-fight in Mexico . . . . . .234

Statue of Chac-Mool, Mexico . . . . .252

12

The Fair Land
of Central America

THE AMERICAN PROBLEM

The United States want to take possession of Latin America —
Danger to Germany and England — Loss to France — Senti-
ment versus business — New stars — Superiority of French
boats — Nautical notes — The last of the sharks — The water-
lilies of the Bourgogne — Christopher Columbus' erroneous and
revolting opinions.

THE United States have made up their mind to
conquer South America. Washington aspires to
become the capital of an enormous empire, com-
prising, with the exception of Canada, the whole
of the New World. Eighty million Yankees want
to annex, not only forty million Spanish Ameri-
cans, but such mines, forests, and agricultural
riches as can be found nowhere else on the face of
the globe.

13

The Fair Land of Central America

This huge enterprise is not a thing of the future :
it has already commenced. The war between
Cuba and Spain, the relinquishment of the Panama
Canal by France, the Stars and Stripes1 ominous
cruises in South American waters, all show the
existence of some fixed idea, and Europe would do
well to see that her interests are not endangered

thereby.

Latin America is a first-rate customer to Ger-
many and England. But when goods manu-
factured in New York and Chicago are allowed to
enter the country free of duty, London and Ham-
burg will find that their trade with Latin America
is practically ruined ; the custom-house barrier
will close the market to them.

Californian wines are not to be compared with
our French clarets, and our fancy goods will be
able to hold their own against the American
article for some time to come. But when South
America has learnt to speak English and to con-
sider Boston as the hub of the intellectual universe,
France's time-honoured fame as the seat of learn-
ing will receive, as far as the Latin races are con-
cerned, her death-blow. Such cities containing
over one million inhabitants, as Rio and Buenos

14

The American Problem

Ayres, will cease to be attracted by the loadstone
Paris, and will gravitate round New York.

It is no laughing matter ! Until lately, Central
America used to send her sons and daughters to
finish their studies in France ; she now sends them
to the United States. The older members of most
families speak French ; the younger generation
only speak English.

What language will they speak to-morrow ?
Will the Spanish-American Creole contrive to free
himself from the rapacious beak and widespread
wings of the American eagle depicted on the
almighty dollar ? The struggle between the
wealthy republic, whose current coinage is repre-
sented by a heavy gold piece worth one hundred
francs, and a wretched tropical republic whose
wealth is all on paper, where one sees bank-notes
of the value of one centime, cannot be of long
duration. However, Chili, Brazil, and the Argen-
tine Republic are in a prosperous condition ; and
seventeen Latin republics, speaking the same
language and observing the same customs, would
be a big mouthful even for Uncle Jonathan,
whose tusks, as everyone knows, are pretty
tough.

is

The Fair Land of Central America

But can and will these nations resist ? In order
to solve this problem, I went to interview those
States which Washington has already begun to
swallow: Panama, already in the ogre's jaws;
the five Central Republics, already in its clutches ;
and Mexico, more exposed to danger but better
able to protect herself, for she is now resist-
ing the invader with all her might and
main.

At first sight it would seem as if it would be
better in the interests of the French language
if the United States' little plans were frustrated.
But in the superior interests of humanity, would it
not be better if a more energetic, enterprising race
took possession of this still uncultivated conti-
nent ?

Happily, our prestige is not entirely dependent
upon the fate of the Latin races. The geogra-
phical position of our country cannot be surpassed.
As in Hernani, where a certain old duke pretends
that he comes of such a noble family that " he is
descended from all the kings in Christendom and
akin to all the dukes on earth >J1 France laves her

1 "... qu'elle louche a la fois

Du pied a tous les dues, du front a tous les rois ! "

16

The American Problem

feet in the Mediterranean while her forehead lies
on the shores of the North Sea ; and thus she in-
cludes both Latin and Northern races among her
children. The born protector of the oppressed,
she knows full well that she has no need to cringe
before other nations ; strong and weak alike love
her.

Would you like to have a typical proof of that
fact ? While the young senoritas of Central
America now go to complete their education in
New York, the misses of that city come to finish
their studies in Paris. The United States' Minister
at Panama, that is to say the highest represen-
tative of the American supremacy in Latin
America, had his three daughters educated in
Paris ; he wanted them to imitate my com-
patriots, and he has succeeded : they are French
from head to foot.

I do not say that three accomplished young
ladies can console us for the loss of the Panama
Canal. But at least we can see that the conquest
of South America by North America would push
Paris Into the background and bring New York
to the fore. It is true that it would be better for
our interests if such an event did not take place ;
B 17

The Pair Land of Central America

however, we run no risk of being entirely eclipsed.
That is one consolation, and we can afford to sit
still and watch the struggle between the two
Americas.

I left Cherbourg March 18, and reached the
Antilles March 31. A few days later I arrived in
Venezuela, from which country I went, from re-
public to republic, and from capital to capital,
until I reached Mexico. I followed nearly the same
route as that taken by Christopher Columbus
four hundred years before me.

Things have changed somewhat since those
days.

All the illustrious Genoese navigator thought
about was whether he would be able to bring back
" gold and spices " from the New World. The
only thing which we care about nowadays is
whether the New World will still continue to buy
its machinery and manufactured articles from
us.

But the difference only lies in words. It is the
old, old story — money. The poet Heredia de-
scribes the old conquistadors and their vague dread
of the unknown in the following verses : —

18

The American Problem

"... When, bending over the prow of their white caravels
They watched bright, unknown stars rise
From the ocean's bosom and mount into unknown skies." 1

I stood leaning over the prow of a black steamer ;
I, too, watched mysterious, ominous, unknown
stars, the forty-five stars of the flag of the United
States, rise from the bosom of the ocean !

The European who wants to get to Central
America has two routes from which to choose :
he can either go via New York or else by the An-
tilles. The first route, which would seem the
shortest, will be the most uncomfortable as long
as no railway connects New York and Panama.

Sea-sickness, far more terrible in the tropics,
the tedious American custom-house regulations,
the most horrible institution on the face of this
earth, more horrible in America than even in
Turkey, and lastly the wretched boats which
ply between New York and Colon2 all help to
prove that this is the worst route. Now the voyage

1 "... Quand, penches a 1'avant des blanches caravelles,

Us regardaient monter en un ciel ignore
Du fond de 1'Ocean des etoiles nouvelles ! "

2 Colon, or Aspinwall.

19

The Fair Land of Central America

by the Antilles, on the contrary, is accomplished
without a change in seventeen days, and becomes
like a pleasant yachting trip as soon as one passes
the ever-restless coast of the Azores.

Six European navigation companies invite the
choice of the would-be traveller. However, the
management on the Italian and Spanish boats
leaves much to be desired. As the Dutch boats
are cargo-boats and touch at every port the voyage
is much longer. The German, English, and French
companies alone compete in the matter of speed
and comfort. The latter, having just built some
new and very luxurious boats of seven thousand
five hundred tons, comes first on the list. In
reality the pleasure of such a voyage depends upon
a factor which no company can guarantee : one's
fellow-passengers across the ocean who, for a whole
fortnight, represent the civilized world to you.
For the beauty of a sunset at sea, the poetry of
the dolphin's movements as it turns a somersault
between two waves, the flying-fish as it skims over
the foam like a silver arrow, the grandeur of the
tempest and all the splendours of the ocean are
powerless to prevent us feeling lonely. Man has
ever found his fellow-creatures more interesting

20

The American Problem

than anything else in creation. We are terribly
sociable animals. If we ever manage to fly about
among the stars, those myriads of planets will only
bore us if we have nobody with whom to exchange
our impressions.

That is why it is best to choose a boat belonging
to one's own nationality, that is to say a boat
whose crew and staff speak one's own tongue.
Foreign boats may be more amusing, but it is
much better to resist the desire to be amused,
even if one does happen to speak English and
German fluently. We can speak other languages,
but we can only converse in our native tongue.
Each nation has its own particular faults and
failings, but we soon perceive that those with
which we are most familiar are the easiest to
bear.

Except for this fact, it is usually agreed that the
French boats have the best cooking, while the
German and English are the best managed.
You know you are on a French boat when the
stewards joke or swear at each other behind your
back. You know that you are on an English boat
when the uneatable meat has to be deluged with
hot sauces before you can swallow it, and when the

21

The Fair Land of Central America

pastry and cakes, apparently constructed of
pasteboard, seem made expressly for the punish-
ment of the greedy. Lastly, you may be quite
sure that you are on a German boat when a
trumpet announces the dinner-hour : Forward !
march !

Travelling is being brought to such a pitch of
perfection and comfort, that we must hurry up
if we want to describe a sea-voyage as it now is.
To-morrow coal will perhaps be replaced by
radium or wireless electricity. The great trans-
atlantic boats of thirty thousand tons which race
across the ocean from Europe to America in five
days and which to-day seem the very latest thing
out, will then seem as far away from us as the
frigates of Trafalgar or the galleys of Salamis.
It would be very interesting if we could see the
log-book of one of those galleys or of a royal frigate
of olden times. We wonder what life on board
ship was like in those days ; Robinson Crusoe
and Petronius' Satyricon owe much of their
popularity to their graphic description of daily
life.

But the boats which go to the Antilles are by no
means as large as those which cross to New York.

22

The American Problem

Such monsters as the Lusitania and the Mauve-
tania, whose boilers devour a ton of coal every
minute and cost the company about eighty
thousand francs each day of the voyage, are much
too grand for Central America. The latter country
already finds it hard enough to pay the Trans-
atlantic Company for its steamers which scarcely
consume more than a ton of coal In a quarter of
an hour, and which can go to Mexico and back for
the sum of three hundred and twenty thousand
francs — a mere trifle !

Certain boats are like certain trains in which
it is not the first but the third-class carriages that
pay. So it is on board certain ships where, if only
first-class passengers were carried, the company
would soon become bankrupt. It is the emigrants,
huddled together on the forecastle, and who some-
times number nearly a thousand, who represent the
largest profit ; for they pay fifteen francs a day,
while their food only costs the company from
fifty to seventy-five centimes at the most. They
squat or lie on deck, higgledy-piggledy, almost
on the top of one another, humming some national
air through their noses or playing loto — a dan-
gerous game ! The sly dog who draws the numbers

23

The Fair Land of Central America

is an old hand at it ; he is a consummate swindler.
I was shown an unfortunate peasant from Galicia,
who had lost seven thousand francs, representing
four long years of hard work under a tropical
sun.

The first-class passengers only play bridge at
one centime a point, but they have other pleasures :
good food, amusing books, and siestas in deck-
chairs on the promenade deck, fanned by the
breeze and rocked by the sea, which pleasant
operation produces an exquisite feeling of drowsi-
ness. And then the first-class passengers never do
any work. I have been on twelve different boats ;
never have I seen a passenger using the leisure
hours of a sea voyage in order to study or read
any serious book. The same man to whom a lazy
day would seem unbearable on shore, will spend
weeks between heaven and sea without using his
brain. The steamer's engines work for him.
Everyone feels as if they were being hurried along
by millions of steam-horses galloping as fast as
they can, day and night, in thfe monster's throb-
bing ribs ; and the sensation of such a race is
enough to take away any wish one may have to
work.

24

The American Problem

And yet how lonely the ocean is ! In the whole
of the Atlantic I only saw one inhabited spot on
the outward journey : that spot is one of the
islands of the Azores ; we went so close that we
could almost touch it and were able to read the
time on the face of the village church clock. . . .
You can't even do that on the homeward journey.
The ship goes farther north in order to profit by
the Gulf Stream, that great stream of warm water
which describes a majestic curve before it goes to
act as a sort of huge heating apparatus to European
civilization ! And the only living creatures which
lift the blue winding-sheet of this desert are, with
the exception of a few flying-fish, a family of
whales, three black backs, three jets of foamy
water following one behind the other ; papa goes
first, then comes mama, and lastly the young
hopeful. These animals are not very inquisitive.
The sight of a boat bigger than themselves seems
to wake neither interest nor fear in their minds ;
and they, unlike the porpoises who follow the boat
for hours, methodically plunge along and continue
on their journey without turning to the left or to
the right. And the sharks ? those wonderful
sharks which land-lubbers imagine fellow boats

25

The Fair Land of Central America

in order to swallow up anyone who may happen
to fall or to be thrown overboard ? The sharks are
nowhere! They swim far too slowly! It is
impossible for them to keep up with a steamer
making twelve knots an hour. The speed of the
modern transatlantic boat has been too much for
these connoisseurs of human flesh ! There must
be a deplorable number of unemployed among
the sharks !

No one thinks anything of making a sea-voyage
nowadays. You are exposed to very little danger,
less than in a train, and far less than in an auto-
mobile. You run no risk of being shipwrecked
unless your steamer collides in a fog with a sailing-
vessel. Steamers look upon sailing-boats in the
same light as automobiles regard market-<:arts
on a high road. You are lost if a collision occurs !
The Bourgogne, notwithstanding her watertight
compartments, sank in a quarter of an hour,
engulfing hundreds of human lives, with the ex-
ception of sixty who were rescued by the three-
master which ran her down. The ship's boats
were useless ; on such occasions they are always
seized by the emigrants, who keep them at the
point of the knife. This was what happened in

26

The American Problem

the case of the Bourgogne. But the emigrants
did not benefit by their capture, for the waves
smashed each boat to pieces against the hull of
the vessel as soon as it was lowered into the sea.
In case of accident, the best thing to do is to
throw oneself into the water with a chair or
any piece of wood capable of being used as a
buoy.

Life-belts are capital things when you know
how to fasten them on — which very few passengers
know how to do. One of the sailors saved from
the Bourgogne told me the following gruesome
story : —

" Many of the ladies seized their life-belts which
they, unaware that they ought to fasten them
under their armpits, with one accord fastened
round their waists. So when they jumped into the
sea, the weight of their bodies bent their heads
under water. In the dim evening light the dark
surface of the sea seemed as if covered with
water-lilies."

Ladies always seem particularly beautiful and
fascinating on board ship ; but when you reach

27

The Fair Land of Central America

port, you suddenly perceive that they are rather
plain if anything, and that it is because they are few
and far between that you value their society so
highly. If I were a pretty woman, and if I did
not suffer from sea-sickness, I think I should
spend my whole life on board ship, even if I were
the only woman on board, on condition that I had
a good strong bolt on my cabin door and a revolver
within my reach. Don't laugh 1 Anyone who
would write a book called Nights on a Trans-
atlantic Boat would have plenty of yarns to spin,
and could make our hair stand upon end with
horror at the dreadful things which might happen
if there were only two or three women to every
hundred men ! But I did not go to America in
order to tell you stories about the fair sex, unless
I except American ladies.

But let us wait a bit !

My steamer forged along over a sort of vast
watery prairie, apparently formed of clumps of
floating grass ; these clumps were seaweed from
the Sargassa Sea, and it was probably owing to
their presence in the Gulf Stream that Christopher
Columbus discovered America. The presence of
this alga made him think that the land which

28

The American Problem

produced these tufts of grass must be near at hand,
and so he was encouraged to persevere. What a
mistake ! Christopher Columbus made many ;
in fact, he made nothing but mistakes. He died
unaware that he had discovered a new continent
and firmly convinced that he had only touched
at the West Indies.

Neither did Columbus, as is generally believed,
assert that the earth was round. He explained the
sudden deviation of the magnetic needle when
passing the Azores, by declaring that the earth
was shaped like a woman's breast and that he
had just sailed round the tip. He sent long docu-
ments to the Spanish sovereigns in which he
affirmed that the Island of Cuba was larger than
the whole of Spain ; and he proved, Bible in hand,
that it could only be the terrestrial paradise
described in Genesis. He praised the good-
natured Indians, whom he saw running about
stark naked on the seashore, uttering cries of joy,
and offering him flowers and fruit in token of
their good-will ; and he writes to their Catholic
Majesties : " These people will make good
slaves."

He was a great man, but he was always making

29

The Fair Land of Central America

mistakes or expressing erroneous opinions. His
example gives me courage to continue, and I
shall now endeavour to follow where he once
trod.

THE ANTILLES AND VENEZUELA

Two charming divinities : the yellow fever and the plague —
Tartarin as a planter — A negro Mediterranean — Venus in the
Barbadoes — Fried dolphin and turtle cutlets — An American
Hong- Kong — The colour problem — A terrestrial paradise-
Vampires — The everlasting Castro — Four hundred revolutions
in one century — Seven thousand generals — A ball in Vene-
zuela— Why Venezuela can afford to defy "Europe.

WHEN one has been rolling about on the top of a
boiler for a fortnight without intermission, endured
the horrors of sea-sickness, slept badly, eaten
little, shivered with the cold in Europe, roasted
in the tropics, and lived in the sickening stench
of hot grease which exhales from all engine-rooms
and manages to poison the air on the best regulated
transatlantic boats ; when one has reached that
state when the most ardent lover of the sea would
give all the oceans in the world to be able to lie
down in silence on a plot of green grass for one
single hour ; in short, when one has already begun
to catch a glimpse of the Promised Land, and when

The Fair Land of Central America

the palm trees, swinging their vegetable plumage
'twixt azure sky and indigo sea, welcome you and
whisper to you that your troubles are all
over — well ! when all that happens you would
do well to refrain from expressing your satis-
faction on learning this welcome piece of good
news.

For if you go and interview the captain, in order
to find out when you can land, you may be dis-
agreeably surprised to hear that much ornamented
personage reply that no one can land on account
of the quarantine.

" But I am going to the Island of Trin-
idad ! "

" Can't be done, sir. Trinidad is in quarantine ;
they've got yellow fever there."

" Never mind. I only wanted to go to Trinidad
to see what it was like. I will go on with the boat
to La Guayra, the seaport for Venezuela ; I've
got some business to do there.''

" Can't be done, sir. La Guayra is in quaran-
tine ; they've got the bubonic plague at La
Guayra."

The yellow fever and the bubonic plague were
the two divinities who came to greet me on the

32

The Antilles and Venezuela

threshold of tropical America. If they had not
turned up, their sisters malaria, malignant fever
and black fever would have appeared. There are,
I believe, fevers of all colours, characterized
by the colour of the vomit. It was a pleasant look
out ! The passengers bound for this terrestrial
paradise put the finishing touch to your terror
by recounting horrible stories. According to
them, clouds of mosquitoes dance like a troop of
vampires round the landing-stage.

" You'll be bitten as soon as you land. When
once you've been bitten, you're bound to get
fever ; and whoever gets fever is a dead
man I "

When you venture to remark in a trembling
voice :

" But how is it that you and your families
have managed to keep alive ? " they reply

" Oh ! we were stung in our cradles. We have
been vaccinated, so to speak, and so we cannot
contract fever. But new-comers are at the mercy
of the mosquitoes. "

Each colonial is quite proud of his country's
own particular disease, and assumes a superior
air when addressing the pale, trembling foreigner,
c 33

The Fair Land of Central America

Tartarins are found all over the world and are
quite as plentiful among planters as among Alpine
climbers. As to the shopkeepers in those seaport
towns, whose interest it is to attract visitors,
they manage to drive the latter away by their
awful accounts of their neighbour and rival's
misfortunes. Thus, in the West Indies, two
islands — Jamaica and Trinidad — are fighting for
the honour of supplying England with their
different commodities. Jamaica, thanks to her
proximity to the United States, has, at present,
got the best of it. However, Trinidad is getting
stronger every day ; standing as she does at the
mouth of the Orinoco, she enjoys the position
of foster-child to Venezuela.

Whenever anyone dies of anything but old age
in Trinidad, it is amusing to see how Jamaica
hurries up to lay an embargo on any boats fool-
hardy enough to touch at that pestilential Trini-
dad !

The barber of the steamer which brought me
from Europe, a boat which touches regularly
at both islands, confided to me that this was the
eighth time that he had passed by Trinidad with-
out being allowed to land. Crew and passengers

34

TRINIDAD: WOMEN GOING TO MARKET

MEXICO: THE STATE PRISON

To face page 34

The Antilles and Venezuela

are obliged to stay on board, for Jamaica, with
her threat of an embargo, is just over the horizon ;
and so it has to be.

One can see that England's boast that all her
colonies pull together must be taken with a pinch
of salt, and that local interests come before inter-
national competition. This is a reassuring dis-
covery, for it shows that no race, no matter how
proudly it may boast of its splendid isolation,
will ever be able to form an exclusive government
on the face of the globe. The English colonies
are all jealous of one another and abuse one
another, just as the French and Spanish colonies
used to do, and as the widely separated States of
the all too vast Republic of the United States will
to-morrow hate and abuse each other — that is
an important point in the pan-American problem.
But before reaching Trinidad — where I landed,
notwithstanding all their yellow and black fevers
which, however, did not manage to scare me, for
I find that the best recipe in order to keep young
and strong is to look at everything through rose-
coloured spectacles — I landed for a few hours,
the first time I had been on dry land since
we left Europe thirteen days ago, at Barbadoes,

35

The Fair Land of Central America

another English possession, of less geographical
importance but quite as thickly populated as

Trinidad.

Populated— yes, indeed, with negroes I For
everyone knows that that huge expanse of water
stretching from the Caribbean Sea to the Gulf of
Mexico, called by the geographer Reclus " the
American Mediterranean," might be termed, es-
pecially if one adds the coasts of Florida and
Louisiana, " a negro Mediterranean." For three
centuries the slave trade was carried on without
interruption. Every hue of the African epi-
dermis is represented, from the ebony-black of
Congo to the mahogany-red and gingerbread-
yellow of Guinea.

Add a large proportion of mulattoes, quad-
roons, mongrels of every degree. Some little
stark-naked niggers, like small statues carved in
rose-wood, gazed up at us with pale blue or light
grey eyes, the cause of which the honourable
negro ladies who gave them birth alone can ex-
plain. It is becoming quite a difficult thing to
find a perfectly black negro.

These millions of negroes do as little work as
possible. The English were obliged to import

36

The Antilles and Venezuela

Hindus to the Island of Trinidad in order to get
someone to do their heavy jobs for them. The
negroes do not pretend to be of princely birth,
but they refuse to be slaves 1 What can you ex-
pect of a race which lives upon a halfpenny-worth
of bananas a day, and which can make a pair of
pink calico drawers and a tattered shirt, or a
petticoat and a mauve muslin bodice, last for a
whole year ?

However, the agents for the Panama Canal,
thanks to the promise of a daily wage of one dollar,
managed to persuade whole shiploads of these
negroes to go back with them to Panama and to
work for them. When our boat left Barbadoes,
it took two hundred more of these negroes with
their wives, brats, rags, and poultry. These
wretched creatures, so tightly packed that they
could scarcely move, lay huddled together on
deck day and night. They managed to eat and
to sleep, however, and to be sick, also, for the
sea was rough. Poor creatures ! poor negro
race ! This, perhaps, was their first voyage since
that far distant day when a slaver brought their
ancestors chained together in the hold, like a drove
of cattle.

37

The Fair Land of Central America

These negroes came up on deck unfettered —
at least, we could see no chains. Things are a
trifle better than they were three centuries ago —
that is something ! However, they seemed fairly
contented. Those of their number who were not
too ill laughed or chanted aloud out of their
prayer-books. One little orange-coloured mulatto
girl, of about fifteen years of age, rolled her soft
brown eyes with a savage grace as she replaited
her woolly tresses before a tiny piece of looking-
glass.

A torrid sun was blazing overhead when we
cast anchor before the Island of Barbadoes. The
ship's boat took ten minutes to reach the shore.
Hardly had we taken our seats in the boat, when
the sky began to lower ; then a fine, cold rain
commenced to fall ; it quickly became a deluge
which wetted us to the skin and penetrated
through our parasols and thin white linen clothes.
The sun did not reappear until we had reached
the hotel, where we arrived muddied up to our
eyes. This was to teach us that it is ad-
visable not to visit the tropics in the rainy
season.

38

The Antilles and Venezuela

To get to the hotel we had to traverse the whole
town, or rather the whole village ; for lanes run
between the gardens belonging to the Europeans'
villas and the rows of negro cabins. We met a
little girl, who had also been overtaken by the
storm, trotting along under a big umbrella with
her petticoats carefully tucked up ; she evidently
belonged to some well-to-do family, for her little
underclothes were white as snow ; nothing could
have been more pretty and more quaint than those
little bare black legs and feet protruding from
under the white lace frills. I was reminded of
some of our French seaside places where other
little girls show their funny thin little sunburnt
legs just in the same way, when they tuck up their
petticoats in order to play on the beach. But
there the flesh was black, and I suddenly felt
oh ! so far away !

When these dusky or orange-coloured little
girls are a few years older, they will set up house
in one of those cabins situated on the road leading
from the quay to the hotel. The cab-drivers of
the place will not forget to ring the big bell, which
they always carry on the seat by their side,
whenever they happen to be driving any wealthy

39

The Fair Land of Central America

gentlemen ! All seaport towns are alike, but
immorality is more barefaced in tropical seaport
towns than elsewhere.

Barbadoes, being an English possession, boasts
of an excellent hotel, where you are received under
a veranda by crowds of black servants clad in
white jackets adorned with gilt buttons. They
are very fine ; and they evidently know that fact,
for they despise the tourist, and, except at meal-
time, take care to do nothing but look ornamental.
You have to look out for yourself ! No one pays
the least attention to you, and you might pocket
all the ornaments off the drawing-room mantel-
piece without anyone taking the trouble to stop
you. That is probably the reason why there are
no ornaments. A drawing-room in the Antilles is
a sort of a barn with little tables and straw
chairs. The walls and floor are as bare as the
back of one's hand. Luxury, here, consists
of keeping one's woodwork spotlessly clean ;
poverty means living in a dirty wooden
shanty. The hotel at Barbadoes is a first-rate
hotel.

At luncheon, for one dollar you can have fried
dolphin (a delicious dish), turtle cutlets (very

40

The Antilles and Venezuela

tasteless), fried bananas (a horrible mess), sweet
potatoes (no better), and the never-failing and
comforting curry, a dish of rice dressed with
a greenish, peppery sauce, the Asiatic's favourite
dish, as the couscous1 is the African's favourite
dish. In all English colonies, when you don't
know what to choose from the barbarous restau-
rant menu, you ask for curry and your lost appe-
tite returns at once. It is scarcely to be wondered
at ! The effect of a mouthful of curry is just
as if you had discharged a pistol down your
throat !

I only spent a few hours in Barbadoes, but it
did not strike me that English education was very
advanced in that island. At least the inhabitants
are not very good at arithmetic ; for when I asked
the lady-cashier at the hotel to give me sixty
stamps, that honourable Creole dame took up a
sheet of stamps and carefully counted them one by
one until she got to the sixtieth. The idea never
occurred to her that she might give me six rows
of ten stamps. When you ask for your bill in

1 Couscous : the name of an Arabian dish consisting of very
small balls of minced meat and flour fried in oil.

41

The Fair Land of Central America

that hotel, I should advise you to see that you get
it two days before the boat starts.

I made many other observations in the animal
and vegetable kingdom on the Island of Barba-
does ; but as I soon started for Trinidad, where
one sees much the same things only much more
beautiful, I will say no more on that subject. I
knew that I should be able to get a passport at
Trinidad for Venezuela and wait for a chance to go
on to Caracas, where I intended to try and beard
the formidable President Castro in his den.

So I went back to pass one more night on the
Orinoco, that ancient English boat which brought
me from Europe. The Orinoco is thirty years old ;
were she an elephant, a carp, or a Parisienne she
would still be quite young ; but as a steamer she
is far too old.

The Orinoco knows nothing about the luxury
of the modern transatlantic boat. When she takes
in her coal, instead of swallowing her fuel through
a little aperture in her hull, as all properly con-
ducted boats do nowadays, she takes it through
a large hole on deck, which operation for the next
twenty-four hours turns the deck into something
as clean as a coal mine.

42

The Antilles and Venezuela

Of the thirty-five passengers who embarked at
Southampton and Cherbourg, I was nearly the
last man to suffer from that operation. My com-
panions were already scattered about on the three
or four inter-colonial boats which, together with
the Orinoco, lay in the harbour and were now
about to weigh anchor and sail to the Guianas
or the Greater Antilles. These thirty-five passen-
gers had become such friends during the fort-
night passed in each other's company, that they
organized a fancy-dress ball for the last night of
the voyage ! We had exhausted every topic of
conversation, and we knew each other so well
that we were beginning to get tired of each other !
And that night we separated and sailed away
towards other lands where we shall soon forget
that we ever met.

These men and women, whose Christian names
id little faults and failings I knew, were suddenly
dead to me, as if they had never existed. That
g French engineer, who was going to explore
>me Venezuelan mines, was dead to me ! The
>ale English girl, who was going to be governess
in some far-away corner of British Guiana, was
as if she had never existed ! The red-faced

43

The Fair Land of Central America

jeweller from Berlin, with his high collar, who
intended to open a branch establishment in
Havana, was quite forgotten ! The beautiful
lady, whose two little daughters had amused us
throughout the voyage and who were going to
join their papa — a planter on some tropical
island adorned with an old Spanish name — had
faded away into the past !

They had all gone, disappeared into the dis-
tance like smoke, like the smoke of the steamers
which were now carrying them away over the
horizon !

Human life is but the prelude to the dance of
death.

Trinidad and Jamaica are both struggling to
obtain the honour of supplying England with their
own particular commodities. " Trinidad is going
to be the Hong Kong of South America." Every-
one makes the same remark in speaking of this
island's position at the mouth of the wide Orinoco.
That may be. But one thing is certain, and that
is that the whole of Venezuela already goes to
Trinidad to do its marketing. Its enormous stores
sell everything under the sun, from " hair- wash "

44

o

s 2

n

Q _
05 °

s §

The Antilles and Venezuela

to dye the senoritas' hair a becoming shade of
red, to iron bridges and railway-engines. In
a certain shop nearly as big as the Louvre
or the Bon Marche, I paid one dollar for a
straw hat of the very best quality ; it would
probably have cost me double that price in
Paris.

This result is due to the Scotch who have mon-
opolized the import trade, while the export trade,
represented by plantations of cacao trees, still
remains in the hands of many old French families
who were driven from San Domingo by the Revo-
lution.

For the foreigner, the charm of Trinidad
neither lies in its hardware stores nor in its
plantations of cacao trees, but in the wonderful
and astonishing tropical vegetation which still
covers three-fourths of the island with an immense,
uncultivated forest. No doubt the French Antilles
possess quite as luxuriant forests, but Trinidad
has one advantage in that carriage-roads run
through its forests. You can drive there in your
victoria just as if you were driving in the Bois de
Boulogne.

Who make and keep these magnificent roads

45

The Fair Land of Central America

in good condition ? Certainly not the two hun-
dred thousand negro inhabitants of that island ;
for they, having worked too hard during three
centuries of slavery, have evidently sworn to
take things easy until Judgment Day. No ! those
road-makers are Hindu coolies from the banks of
the Ganges, who are engaged to work for five
years. One hundred thousand of these coolies
have settled down at Trinidad apparently for
ever and aye. They have built villages where they
worship Siva and still observe the laws of caste
with the greatest care. Of course they do not
associate with the blacks.

The only mongrels whom one sees at Trinidad
are negro Indians, mixed bloods, a very well
developed, mahogany-coloured type, with hand-
some, refined features ; but being descended from
slaves and savages they are predisposed to slavery
and savagery.

As for the mulattoes, that is to say the offspring
of black and white races, they form a clan to
themselves between the pure white Creole and the
coloured folk. They do not stay mulattoes for
long. In tropical countries the mulatto race
becomes black after three generations ; it becomes

46

The Antilles and Venezuela

black again, black in skin and mind if not in
pretensions ! This is a very important fact,
because it does away with any hope of seeing the
huge negro populations of the Antilles, Central
America, and the United States mingle at a future
time with the white race. Contrary to the Spanish-
Indian mixed race, which now peoples all the
Latin American States and which is one of the
most original specimens of humanity under the
sun, the negro-white mongrel must eventually
disappear into the past.

The millionaires of Trinidad dwell in splendid
mansions built round the Savana, a sort of huge
park laid out in the English style and planted
with magnificent trees beneath which cattle,
with spotlessly clean hides, browse day and night.
I shall never forget my first strange walk in the
Savana on the night of my arrival. The stars,
twinkling between the leaves, seemed so close
owing to the clearness of the atmosphere that they
just looked like Chinese lanterns at an evening
fete. Great beasts lying in the velvety shadows
and warm grass underneath gigantic trees gently
raised their horned heads to look at us while
we walked past them ; they reminded me

47

The Fair Land of Central America

of a herd of tame deer, ignorant of man's
cruelty and peacefully dwelling in this terrestrial
paradise.

Several of the benches were occupied by pairs
of negro lovers seated side by side ; their white
garments alone betrayed their presence. Their
faces, as dusky as night itself, were quite invisible.
A white suit was making love to a white muslin
costume ; both wearers seemed headless ; and
although they had apparently been guillotined,
they still continued to bill and coo.

Tropical nights are treacherously warm and
sweet. Nothing warns you that the damp earth
and hot air are very dangerous. The coral snake,
which is about as big as one's finger and whose
bite is usually fatal, glides along in the thick green
grass, while myriads of disgusting insects hover in
the air. The redoubtable vampire, twice as big
as the European bat and always thirsty, flies in
and out of these beautiful trees, while thousands
of mosquitoes are ever waiting to inoculate you
with malaria or yellow fever. I was told a story
of a young Creole lady who slept one night with
her window open and was found at dawn bloodless,
as white as a sheet, and already quite cold. A

48

The Antilles and Venezuela

little purple scar beneath her breast alone showed
where the vampire had sucked the life-blood from
her veins. The terrible kiss is so gentle that it
does not even wake the victim.

The salary of the English Governor of Trinidad
amounts to £6,000 ; were he king, he could not
have more power ; he has the use of the most
beautiful garden in the Antilles. Some marble
tombstones dotted about on a green lawn make
one corner of this garden particularly pathetic.
A beautiful woman of thirty-five years of age,
the wife of the late Governor, sleeps there under
a stone which bears quite a recent date. The
friends who took me to see this little mound
knew the sleeper very well.

" She was a charming woman. She was killed
close to our house by falling out of her carriage.
Only five minutes before the accident she had
passed us driving herself in her tilbury and had
gaily saluted us with her whip. . . ."

The broken-hearted husband asked to be given
a post in another colony. It appears that he is
likely to have a splendid future. There is no future
for his poor wife who will now never leave Trini-
dad ! Many a traveller thinks he is landing only
D 49

The Fair Land of Central America

for a few days on some foreign shore who never
leaves it again.

On the Island of Trinidad, where the tenacious
English have been waiting for more than a century
to get a footing in the fabulously wealthy but un-
tamable republic of Venezuela, there is only one
topic of conversation. At the Club — a magnifi-
cent club which cost fifty thousand dollars and
where one finds every variety of cocktail under
the sun, but not a single book — at the Ice House,
a bad hotel where the cooking is very good ; or
at the Queen's Park, a good hotel where the cook-
ing is bad ; in the Governor's heavenly garden,
or in the French Consul's humble home, everyone
whom I met, shopkeeper or planter, English,
French, or Venezuelan, could only talk of one
person : Castro, the everlasting Castro !

El Senor Cipriani Castro, the most celebrated
man in South America since the time of Bolivar,
is the talk of the whole world. So it is not to be
wondered at that he should be the favourite topic
of conversation with the inhabitants of Trinidad,
all of whom feel the effects of his policy in a more
or less direct manner.

The Antilles and Venezuela

As long as anyone can remember, Trinidad has
always been the haunt of Venezuelan revolu-
tionists. Whenever a revolution breaks out in
Caracas — and there have been one hundred and
four revolutions in less than a century — the
victorious party takes up its abode at the Yellow
House, which is the presidential residence, while
the vanquished party makes off to Trinidad,
where it immediately begins to hatch another
conspiracy. A plot was commenced when Sefior
Castro came into power, and it has been maturing
for the last ten years ; it ought to be ripe by now !
While strolling up and down that delightful
public walk which encircles the Savana, I was
shown several groups of excited men dressed in
straw hats and short jackets. They were Vene-
zuelan generals. I was assured that Venezuela
possessed seven thousand generals — the other
soldiers are only colonels — so the presence of
two or three dozen generals among the revolu-
tionists at Trinidad ought to surprise no one.

When Colonel Corao passed through Trinidad
a few years ago fleeing from Sefior Castro's wrath,
he suggested to the French Transatlantic Steam-
ship Company that they should buy him an old

The Fair Land of Central America

tub of four thousand tons — the Versailles — with
which he flattered himself he would be able to
exterminate the entire Venezuelan squadron.
The bargain was not concluded. So General Corao
set up in Paris, where he took to racing and in
future contented himself with winning money
on our race-courses. The generals whom I saw
in Trinidad did not strike me as being either
rich or clever enough to be dangerous to their
country.

I heard all sorts of contradictory reports con-
cerning Castro himself, the dictator who refuses
to be deposed, and who, for the past ten years,
has managed to baffle all his countrymen's efforts
to get rid of him. One person told me that he was
dying of a loathsome disease, and that he was
invisible to all except his most intimate friends.
Another person assured me that he had lately
given a ball in imitation of some of Nero's orgies
at his summer palace at Miraflores ; it seems that
all the ladies were personal friends of his and that
they were all arrayed in the costume of Eve.

Rubbish ! Joking apart, I must confess that
General Castro seems to inspire even his most
deadly enemies with a certain amount of respect.

52

The Antilles and Venezuela

The man evidently impresses everyone who has
anything to do with him, with his extraordinary
energy, pluck and intelligence.

But I was not to see him yet. The North
Americans in Colon, who are on very bad terms
with Castro, had just put the port of Caracas into
quarantine under pretence that plague had
broken out in that town. I could still enter
Venezuela if I wished to do so, but I could not
be so sure of leaving it. So I postponed my visit
to the great man and remained outside La Guayra,
the seaport of Caracas, with which town we were
forbidden to hold any communication.

I stayed from sunrise to sunset on the deck of
the boat which was to take me on to Panama,
examining the perpendicular mountain behind
which Castro's invisible capital can resist any
amount of bombarding. Old wiseacres in Europe,
who talk of a possible naval demonstration against
La Guayra by the massed squadrons of the world,
have never seen that squalid, straggling village
with its two or three hundred hovels crouching
at the foot of a sunburnt rock. A few shells
would soon reduce those hovels to ruins. But the
little locomotive which zigzags up and down, and

53

The Fair Land of Central America

pops in and out of the mountain, would only have
to disappear down a tunnel with a sarcastic
whistle, for Venezuela, having retired into her
shell like a snail, to be able to defy all the fleets of
the world !

54

PANAMA

A rising young diplomatist — The pleasures of travelling in Co-
lombia— Athens devoured by Rome — Fashions on board ship
— The poultry is kept inside — The story of a honeymoon
trip — A travelling museum of ethnology — Panama is a fraud
— A cold bath or a good meal ? — The human moth — Captives
— The President's country-seat — Feminine caprice — Two
views of Panama— Cellars and bird-cages— The Yankee beats
John Chinaman—" Dingler's Folly "—France at the mercy
of a mosquito — Politicians — Dictature tempered by a call to
arms — " Cheat, but don't break each other's heads ! " — Lazy-
land — Cooks and dressmakers — Four-legged worshippers —
A bishop and a theatre — The Panama Canal — A novelty in
forests — The Canal will be finished about the year 1920 —
Japanese spies — Why the Yankee will succeed where the
Frenchman failed.

WILL the Belgians be proud to learn that their
country is now suitably represented in Colombia
by a rising young diplomatist ? They ought to be,
were it only to reward their brave countryman
who has carried their flag to that distant land.
For it is not a small matter to go and plant the
flag of one's country, or indeed any flag whatever,
at Santa F6 de Bogota. The fifteen days' sea-

55

The Fair Land of Central America

voyage is a mere nothing. But the European
steamer, which puts you down at Puerto-Columbia,
only brings you to the threshold of the real jour-
ney, which consists in ascending the River Magda-
lena for two more terrible weeks : terrible on
account of the heat, the mosquitoes and the
fever.

I happened by chance to cross the ocean with
the plucky Belgian who had accepted this mission,
which the forty members of his country's consular
corps had refused to undertake. His name was
Soubre ; he was thirty-five years of age, short,
wiry, remarkable for a beautiful golden beard,
a tremendously high collar and a very distin-
guished air. Well-read and a capital linguist — two
accomplishments which seldom go hand-in-hand
— this M. Soubre was a fascinating fellow. If all
Belgian consuls were up to his standard, that
little country would be fairly well represented
abroad.

This charge d'affaires' luggage consisted of
seventy-five trunks — and he was travelling all
alone. His wife was not to join him for some time.
Seventy-five trunks for one man are not bad !
Such a man ought to like to be fashionably dressed,

56

Panama

and that is just what he did like ! However, his
seventy-five trunks contained not only his clothes
but all his furniture. It seems that one can get
nothing at Bogota ; everything has to be brought
from Europe.

A French engineer, who was going to work a
gold mine in the mountains, had brought five
thousand chests with him ! He had to convey all
his machinery piecemeal up the dangerous River
Magdalena. Three hundred chests containing
dynamite were placed on a little river steamer,
between the engine-room and the diplomatist's
seventy-five trunks. For several days dynamite,
boilers, engineer and diplomatist were going to
live cheek by jowl under a broiling sun, on an
unknown river, at the mercy of a negro stoker.
Not only were they exposed to the risk of getting
sunstroke, but they were surrounded by yellow-
fever mosquitoes, with dynamite under their
feet and crocodiles all around them ; and then
people say that diplomatists have an easy time
of it !

The chief cause of Colombia's troubles, including
the greatest of all her losses, the loss of the
province of Panama, lies in the fact that her capital

57

The Fair Land of Central America

is too far away from the coast. We noticed, on
putting in at Puerto-Columbia, how the poverty
of this country, which is six times larger than
France, was reflected in the rate of exchange.
If you land with one hundred francs in European
gold, you are given ten thousand francs' worth
of paper-money I There is paper, paper every-
where, and not a piece of metal to be seen. You
receive bank-notes to the value of one centime,
and precious dirty notes too ! No one in Colombia
can say that money does not smell.

The street-hawkers in Puerto-Columbia sell
snakes, panama hats and emeralds. The emerald
mines are on the other side of the country towards
the Pacific. Colombia also possesses splendid
prairies ; indeed, in the matter of horse and cattle
breeding, she might become a successful rival to
Argentine. But Colombia, with her three million
civilized and uncivilized inhabitants, the former
of whom are for ever dabbling in politics, that
curse of all Latin races, is too thinly populated.
The result of this state of affairs is that the
' Wharf " and the entire harbour, the only things
worth seeing in Puerto-Columbia, were constructed
by the United States and belong to them. Bogota

58

Panama

may well boast that she is the Athens of South
America, the town where the purest Spanish is
spoken. . . . The fate of all Athenians is to be
devoured by the brutal and matter-of-fact
Romans.

At last the boat brought us that Sunday
morning, April 12, to the famous harbour of
Colon which, in the near future, hopes to become
the Suez of the Pacific, the gate to the other half of
America, to China and Japan, the key to the
richest countries on the face of the globe. Three
or four navigation companies already ply between
Colon and New York, three or four others go to
Europe, so that the harbour that Sunday was
crowded with English, German, Spanish, and
French transatlantic boats, including the steamer
which had just brought me.

The latter, a newly-constructed boat of seven
thousand tons, dwarfed all her rivals ; her cap-
tain, who was proud of this fact, entered the har-
bour backwards, which, it seems, is the smartest
thing a boat can do.

Colon is nothing but a hideous, straggling town
composed of several hundred huts built of planks
and sometimes of biscuit-tins, and protected from

59

The Fair Land of Central America

the ever-hungry mosquitoes by wire-netting,
which makes them look like a row of larders or
poultry-runs.

The poultry is kept indoors in the hot weather !
The poultry in this case is black, inside and out,
and concocts all sorts of negro dishes behind the
wire-netting. Few American seaports tempt one
to come again or to prolong one's visit.

The captain of the French boat told me an
anecdote of two passengers on his last voyage,
a young Spanish couple, belonging to the aris-
tocracy of Madrid, who had decided to spend
their honeymoon in the New World. First they
were to visit Venezuela and Colombia, then
Panama ; then they were to go to Peru and Chili,
cross the Andes from Santiago to Buenos Ayres,
and so back to Lisbon via Rio de Janeiro. It
sounded most fascinating. But La Guayra, the
port of Venezuela, was quite enough for our young
lovers. Just as they were leaving the luxurious
French transatlantic boat in order to land at the
foot of that arid, sun-scorched mountain inhabited
by ragged, dirty, famished, dark-faced hidalgos,
their courage failed them. They quite forgot why
they had come ; they no longer took any interest

60

Panama

in the fact that pretty Caracas, with its marvellous
scenery, lay behind that rocky barrier. They
only saw an outlandish-looking town, and so they
decided not to visit Venezuela. On reaching
Colombia, it was not a mountain but a wild,
deserted savanna which frightened them. So
they made up their minds that they would wait
to land until they reached Panama.

But when they caught sight of Colon with its
hovels, its mosquitoes and its niggers, the young
bride began to cry. The transatlantic was going
back to Europe on the morrow, so they remained
on board and returned to Europe without having
once set foot on shore. It will be a long time
before South America becomes as popular a place
for honeymooners as Switzerland and Italy.
And yet they were mistaken. If they had taken
the train which runs from Colon to Panama,
they would have soon seen that the journey was
worth the trouble.

This railway is by no means a novelty, for it has
been in existence for the last fifty years. I believe
it was the first to be constructed in the New
World.

It was not the train which was a curious sight,

61

The Fair Land of Central America

but the travellers. There are no separate classes
and compartments as in Europe. So each huge
car contained a collection of human types which
any museum of ethnology might envy.

A most extraordinary looking family was seated
just in front of me. The father was a Chinese
storekeeper. The mother resembled the Caribbean
savages who still run wild in the almost unex-
plored forests of those islands. The three young
daughters were tidily dressed according to the
fashion affected by the senoritas of Panama,
that is to say, in white skirts and black shawls.
They all took after their mama, in that their sallow
faces were triangular-shaped, but they also had
the long narrow eyes of their celestial papa. They
looked sly and not at all disinclined to flirt. What
strange dispositions those daughters of a savage
and a mandarin must have ! . . But perhaps
they are really very simple-minded ; perhaps
their minds have reverted to the old barbaric
chaos of elementary instincts ? Who can
say ? . . .

A little farther along the car were two mulatto
gentlemen from Jamaica, in English suits and loud
neckties. Just in front of them some Mexican

62

Panama

cowboys lay stretched full length on the seat ;
they had made themselves comfortable by dis-
carding all their garments except their trousers
and shirts ; their revolvers lay by their side.
A handsome American lady, eyeglass in hand,
haughtily eyed them from top to toe. She was
evidently the wife of some high functionary on
the Canal, and she wore a dress which must have
been made in the Rue de la Paix, and a hat for
which some New York milliner, on her return from
Paris, had probably asked at least one hundred
dollars.

Yellow, red, black, white and chocolate-
coloured brats ran about and tumbled over our
feet, squalling in English, Chinese, Spanish, or,
what is worse than all, the negro dialect of these
three languages. So we sped on towards Panama,
towards one of three huge junctions of the world
of to-morrow, whither all the races of the Old
World will flock and will amalgamate like metals
in a furnace. That operation was very nearly
accomplished then and there, thanks to the tem-
perature ; for I felt as I sat in that car as if I was
melting like butter in a frying-pan.

The heat was something astonishing. If the

63

The Fair Land of Central America

train had not hurried up we should have melted
into one huge block of variegated humanity,
and the porters at the terminus would have had
to dig us out piecemeal from that melting-house
on wheels ! The prospect of such an event was
not tempting ; so I did my very best not to melt
and to keep myself to myself, but it was a close
shave.

Our train took nearly three hours to cross the
seventy-three kilometres of isthmus, and stopped
at about twenty villages inhabited by workmen
on the Canal. It was much the same scenery
as at Colon : larder-like hovels with black poultry
running about inside. At times we rushed through
virgin forests, where many trees had once been cut
in order to make sleepers for the railway, but
where the ever-encroaching tide of vegetation
had already obliterated all traces of desecration
and had woven an impenetrable thicket. We were
then in the dry season ! When the rains begin,
the telegraph poles have to be overhauled from
time to time, for they have a little habit of sud-
denly producing green twigs. One or two nights
suffice to cover them with creepers. A local wag
said that he only had to plant his walking-stick

64

Panama

in the ground to see it immediately begin to put
forth young shoots.

At last we reached Panama.

But was that really Panama ? — that sun-baked,
waste land sprinkled here and there with colonial
houses all exactly alike, and all as uninteresting
as so many packing-cases ?

No, that was only the American quarter of
Panama. The old Spanish town was farther on,
huddled together on a neck of land laved by the
Pacific. Of the huge, almost shoreless ocean,
the biggest expanse of water on the face of the
globe, one only saw a little blue lake, very like the
Lake of Geneva, with a few tiny boats at anchor.
One has to exercise all one's geographical know-
ledge in order to grasp the fact that hundreds
of similar horizons lie beyond that silver
streak.

I am not a very firm believer in Nunez de
Balboa's wonderful deeds of valour, that con-
quistador who crossed the virgin forests of the
isthmus and who, four centuries ago, was the first
to discover this unknown lake.

History tells us that Balboa drew up into battle
array the six hundred Spanish soldiers and Indian
E 65

The Fair Land of Central America

porters who accompanied him, dressed himself up
in his armour, and, with his helmet and sword,
waded up to his waist in the water and there
planted the flag of His Catholic Majesty, declaring
in a loud voice " that he took possession of this
ocean, its islands and its dry land, from pole to
pole, in the name of the King, his master, by a
special brief from the Holy Father, until Judg-
ment Day ! "

Where the devil did this hidalgo learn that this
blue lake stretched from pole to pole ? If I had
been in his shoes I should have set sail with enough
provisions for a two days' trip. But historical
personages are very fond of uttering speeches
written fifty years after their demise.

Panama, or at least the American quarter, the
town which one first sees on leaving the railway
station, resembles a town in the Congo State.
It has just the same appearance of a temporary
encampment ; it is built on piles on the side of a
slope, and the sight is not a pretty one. But there
is a good deal of solid comfort hidden behind those
plank walls.

The hotel is enormous and everything in it is
as clean as new paint. Negroes, expressly im-

66

Panama

ported from Jamaica because the native article
does not speak English, wait upon you in spotless
white liveries. The rooms are bare of ornaments,
but each is provided with a bathroom. The hotel-
keeper, however, seems to think that one requires
nothing more. He takes no interest in the kitchen
arrangements. The food is left to the tender
mercies of a heathenish nigger and is awful. You
can scarcely eat what is offered to you. But the
china is so clean, the table-linen so white, the jugs
of iced water or iced tea so tempting that you pre-
fer to die of hunger in this clean haven of rest
rather than eat tasty dishes in a second-rate
Spanish inn.

And this was my first comparison between
North and South Americans. The houses of the
former are so clean that you could eat off the floor
— if you could find anything fit to eat. The latter
have plenty to eat, but one lacks the plate and fork,
without which one cannot eat in peace and com-
fort.

I had to choose between a cold bath and a
good meal. It was too hot : so I chose the bath !

If North and South Americans felt, I won't say

67

The Fair Land of Central America

friendship, but any sympathy for each other,
the supremacy of Washington over the entire
New World would only be a question of a few
years.

But they detest one another. The American's
inability to understand the Spaniard constitutes
the most serious obstacle to the expansion of the
United States.

It is at Panama that one notices the antipathy
existing between the two races which are obliged
to live together there. Women help to amalga-
mate nations. Now there can never be any in-
timacy between a North American miss and a
native senorita.

Everyone knows that American women lead
very strenuous lives, but that they lack in-
tellectual culture. The senoras of Panama do
not wake up until about five o'clock in the
afternoon.

The twilight awakens the first stars in heaven
and the first bats in the air ; the senoritas
then begin to stroll up and down the public
promenade.

Until that hour you only meet in the burning
streets bold-faced negresses in showy blouses or

68

Panama

slim half-bred Indians lost in voluminous petti-
coats, such as our little first communicants wear,
trotting along sedately and looking like so many
little bells whose clappers had been smothered
in folds of tulle.

The young white girls do not go out until after
sunset. The white woman becomes a moth in
the tropics.

I do not say that they wait to go out until the
evening breeze begins to blow, for no one knows
what that means in Panama. The sun is so hot,
that when it sinks into the sea no cool breeze
stirs the leaves. One feels that the great ball of
fire is still blazing away under the water. How-
ever, it no longer beats down upon one's head and
one can venture out of doors. The young Creole
then leaves her room, as bare of books and orna-
ments as a savage's cabin, where she has spent
the day dragging herself from hammock to look-
ing-glass and back again. Arrayed in a white skirt
and a Parisian blouse, this pretty little flirt goes
to stroll by the sea on the esplanade of the old
Spanish fortress called Las Bovedas. Her no mo
or fiance is waiting for her and offers her his
arm. The mother follows behind with the un-

69

The Fair Land of Central America

married sisters, and the lovers begin their evening
walk.

Las Bovedas is a bastion jutting out into the
sea ; it formerly overlooked the two gulfs, that
of the canal on the right, and that of old Panama
on the left. The Spaniards, and the Colombians
after them, converted it into a fortress and a
prison. The United States made them remove the
guns ; the prisoners still remain. It is not exactly
what one would call a sanitary or wholesome
prison ; the cells are small vaults situated be-
neath the level of the sea. Nothing could be cooler.
Thanks to the infiltrations of brackish water, the
revolutionists, who used to be herded together
with the common thieves, came out of prison
with their limbs twisted by rheumatism. The
Spanish governors denied that fact. If we believe
them, their prisoners were twisted, not by rheu-
matism, but by immoderate laughter ; no doubt
these fits of hilarity were provoked by the attacks
of thousands of highly diverting rats from which
they were obliged to defend themselves to the best
of their ability.

But all that belongs to the past. The esplanade,

70

Panama

on which the young ladies of Panama walk and
take the air, no longer hides in its bosom anyone
except thieves and murderers. Alas ! a man's
a man for a' that !

Men are buried alive under our feet, and I felt
ashamed to walk to and fro on their tombstones
enjoying the beauty of sky and sea. The cry of
sentinels on the watch lest any of these unfor-
tunate creatures should try to escape quite spoilt
the golden splendour of the silently falling
stars.

But the belles of Panama, the daughters of
hard-hearted conquistadors, don't know what it is
to feel pity. They chatter to their novios ; one
and all are busy building the enchanted palace
of the future ; they revel in their youth and in
their love.

They have but a short time to be happy ! Once
married, the Spanish-American woman, as in the
Mother Country but even more strictly here, will
have to stay at home. The married women in
those parts of the world lead the life of a cloistered
nun.

When once the women of Panama are married
they usually have a child every ten months. I

The Fair Land of Central America

saw families with fifteen children, the eldest of
whom was not yet twenty years of age. If one
allows for deaths and miscarriages, just think
what a life the women must lead from their
fifteenth to their thirty-fifth year. Truly the
Spanish woman sees nothing of life, at least
what we in Europe call life. Between the young
girl and the young mother, the young wife has no
place. When she is once married she never goes
into society. Even if she could spare time from
her maternal duties, the habits and customs of
her country forbid her to go out with any other
man than her husband — and he never takes her
out.

The fact of the matter is that the husband leaves
his wife to look after her household and goes off
to flirt with other women less absorbed by that
interesting occupation. Every married man in
Panama has two or three establishments ; the
wife knows it and says nothing. She will even
adopt her husband's illegitimate children if the
mother dies. Should she refuse to do so, everyone
would blame her. But she never does refuse.
The first thing a young girl says to her novio
is :

72

Panama

"Mi corazon,1 if you ever have any children by
any other woman, bring them to me and I will love
and tend them ! "

A certain wealthy merchant who had exactly
twenty-seven establishments was pointed out to
me. He is a very orderly man. He makes up his
accounts every Saturday and divides his weekly
profits into twenty-seven little paper packets,
which his negro servant then carries to twenty-
seven different addresses. His friends chaff
him on account of the number which beats the
record.

Habits and morals would seem but a ques-
tion of latitude, and the inhabitants of hot
countries seem forced, nolens volens, to commit
polygamy !

We should do well to pause before we assert
that Spanish wives are less happy than French
wives. The Spanish mother adores her children.
Her numerous progeny afford her much real and
wholesome pleasure. Are Frenchwomen, with
their small families of two or three children,
really to be envied ? Do they, by trying to appear

1 Mi corazon : my heart.
73

The Fair Land of Central America

young and to keep their husbands' affections,
really fulfil the laws for which they were created ?
The young girls of Panama, who at fifteen years
of age are really beautiful, soon become dowdy
matrons ; but they have some compensations.
As far as the interests of the race go, the advan-
tage is incontestable. As far as individual happi-
ness goes, if one could peruse the diary of a French
wife and that of a Spanish-American mother,
who knows whether one would not find in the
record of the latter 's life more golden pages and
more happy anniversaries ?

But social and intellectual life suffer alike. The
worldly American women find that the Spanish-
Americans are loath to open their doors to them,
and that when their hostesses have smiled sweetly
they don't seem to have much to say for them-
selves. They are not invited out to dinner-parties.
The Spanish home is a nursery ; it is not a
drawing-room. A Parisian concierge's room con-
tains more ornaments, more luxuries than one
finds in any of the wealthy men's houses in
Panama.

I will cite as an example the country-house

74

Panama

where I was received most cordially by the
President of the Republic of Panama. The latter,
who was formerly a doctor, is seventy-five years
of age and very wealthy ; he had just returned
from a visit to Europe, which Paris, perhaps,
still remembers.

He has a beautiful garden planted with magnifi-
cent trees ; I saw no flowers, however, and very
little fruit, for no one seems to care about it.
The house is tidy and nicely kept, but almost bare
of furniture. The most important thing in the
place is the hammock wherein Don Amador
Guerrero, after seventy-five years of hard work,
has earned the right to rest and to doze. We
know other presidents of other republics, who do
just the same thing. . . .

But his wife, his sister, his daughters, and his
granddaughters, who live with him, lead monoto-
nous lives, which would soon kill a North American
woman. And yet the President's wife is rightly
considered to be a very superior person, the very
soul of the young Republic, and one of the arti-
sans of its independence.

All the ladies whom I met were equally intelli-
gent and sensible, but the cares of a household

75

The Fair Land of Central America

seemed to satisfy their intellectual needs. Such
subjects as society, art and travelling are as a
closed book to them.

And then they are suddenly startled by the
arrival of some American women, the wives or
daughters of diplomatists, admirals, or chief
engineers, who have lived in Paris, travelled all
over the world, visited every museum on the face
of the globe, flirted in three or four languages
— or else the daughters of free America, who wear
yellow cowboy breeches when they ride on horse-
back— that is quite the thing to do out there ! —
and break off a game of tennis in order to go a
crocodile hunt. These women lead the fashion
for more modest folk to follow. They form a little
society all to themselves.

Although there is not much chance to make a
show in a country where there are neither palaces,
nor flowers (for they are almost unknown), nor
carriages, nor Paris fashions, where nobody is
very rich, still with saddle-horses, fine table-linen,
a little silver and exquisite cleanliness every-
where, books, artistic photographs and light
summer costumes, they manage to get along
fairly well. When there are two or three good

76

Panama

talkers and two or three pretty women a little
clique is soon formed.

However, the matrons of Panama, who feel
completely out of it and prefer to shut them-
selves up in their own homes (en su casa)
and never go out, find the manners of the in-
truders far too free and easy to suit their ideas
of propriety.

Perhaps you will say that they are only sulk-
ing ! And what harm can the rancour of a hand-
ful of women do to the gigantic machinery of
President Roosevelt's Pan-American policy ? Yes,
but behind the women of Panama are all the South
American women, as behind the female repre-
sentative of North America are her sisters in the
North. As I have already shown, the men are
divided into two camps : one invades, the other
opposes the invader.

Will the struggle always remain a peaceful one
and only concern commercial interests ? The
Yankee thinks he is going to win. Will it become
open war ? Then . . . the South Americans will
not let themselves be beaten like mere Red Indians.
The United States will soon find that the game is

77

The Fair Land of Central America

not worth the candle ; for the candle, in this case,
would cost too much.

Mr. Roosevelt's policy is therefore at the mercy
of a handful of women. Every Yankee who
marries a South American wife will acquire in-
fluence in the United States. The others are only
building sand-castles on the seashore.

Only, as the Yankees are a nation of engineers
and not diplomatists, they all prefer to build
their sand-castles.

Panama has two towns because there are two
Americas, and because Panama happens to be the
one spot in the New World where these two
Americas meet, not to join forces, but obstinately
to thwart each other's plans and to stand and glare
at each other like two infuriated bulls.

This duel is a most interesting sight to watch.
Panama shows us what will be the future of the
Latin races and to what extent they will be able
to oppose the Germanic invasion. A boxing-match
is now taking place in Panama between the
English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian citi-
zens of the United States, and the Spaniards and
Italians who people South America from Mexico

78

Panama

to the city of Buenos Ayres, which is rapidly
becoming Italianized. I fancy that Northern
and Southern Europe will both be rather wiser
at the end of the bout than they now are.

Picture to yourself the old Spanish town of
Panama, lazily stretched along the shores of the
Pacific, on a peninsula which used to be quite
isolated from the main land by old fortifications,
while the American quarter winds up a neighbouring
hill called Ancon. The Spanish houses, which are
built of bricks, are all low and provided with
large cellars. The American houses are built of
wood and raised well above the ground by piles.
It would seem as if the Spaniards tried to shield
themselves from the blazing sun by grovelling
underground, while the Americans tried to raise
themselves above the torrid surface of the scorched
earth. The Spanish- Americans live in cellars,
and the Yankees live in bird-cages.

But the latter do not give you the impression
of feeling at home. Four years have already
passed since the Zone, which is ten kilometres
long on either side, was given over to them. This
was the huge ransom which the young Republic
of Panama had to pay those who helped her

79

The Fair Land of Central America

to shake off the yoke of Colombia ; for the first
workmen on the Canal, the French, had never
owned an inch of free Zone.

During the last four years the Americans have
managed to build a town which looks more like
an encampment than a city which has come to
stay. Engineers and officials, on coming to
settle here with their wives and families, bring
their furniture, their food and even their niggers,
who come from Jamaica and can only speak
English ! They get their milk, butter and meat
from New York.

They mean to earn their " money " without
letting one cent of it fall into the pockets of the
native storekeepers. One of the latter in my
presence gave vent to his indignation in the
following remark : " They're worse than the
Chinese ! "

The Chinese, who steal to the cemetery at
night in order to dig up their dead and send them
back to China on the sly by the next boat, have
never aspired to annex Panama to the other
possessions of the Sons of Heaven. They make
their pile and then they cut their stick. Have
the Americans, notwithstanding the additional

80

Panama

star which proudly shines on their banner, any
other and more elevated ambition ? Yes ! At
Panama they have bestowed two benefits upon
the population by ridding it of the yellow fever
and by laying down water-pipes.

The Colombian government never made any
improvements. When once the inhabitants of
Panama had paid their taxes, the money was
conveyed by mules to far-away Bogota ; never
was a cent spent on local improvements. At
Bogota, the dictator then in power, haunted
by dread of the dictator of to-morrow, had
something else to do with his money than to
spend it for the good of the ratepayers. The
expenses incurred by civil war swallowed up
everything, while the wretched ratepayers swal-
lowed the poisonous water brought in casks by
the peasantry. The Americans laid down water-
pipes, and, with the money obtained from the
sale of this pure water, were able to under-
take the paving of the streets, which are now
perfect.

But the greatest benefit which the inhabitants
owe to the Americans is the disappearance of
the yellow fever which used to decimate the
F 81

The Fair Land of Central America

French in a fearful manner, so that Panama
had become a sort of antechamber to the grave.
The traveller can still see, on a hill at the entrance
to the Canal, a house known as " Dingler's
Folly/' 1 which has a very sad history. The
chief engineer, Dingier, arrived in Panama from
France in 1883 as the company's representative,
and built this house out of bravado on a pesti-
lential swamp. He only laughed when people
tried to frighten him with gruesome stories of
the yellow fever. " It only attacks drunkards
and rakes ! " he used to reply.

He never occupied this house which had cost
him fifty thousand dollars because, before it was
finished, his son, his daughter, and his wife all
died one after the other of yellow fever. The
unfortunate man returned to Europe broken-
hearted. He died in a lunatic asylum.

The American occupation coincided with the
discovery of the way to inoculate the terrible
fever which is due to the bite of one mosquito
among many thousands, the stegomia fasciata,

i Folie Dingier. The French word folie has two meanings :
folly or madness, and a country residence.

82

Panama

a mosquito apparently exactly like all its brethren
except that it has three white stripes on its hind
legs. The female alone is dangerous ; the victim
feels no evil effects for the first ten days. But
the creature's powers of inoculation last for
six months ! It has time to poison a whole
town !

As the stegomia fasciata only breeds on the
surface of stagnant water, one need only drain
all marshy land for it to disappear and the yellow
fever with it. If the discovery of the hema-
tozoairies is due to the splendid work of a French
physician, M. Laveran, the Americans at Panama
have at least the merit, by no means to be despised,
of having done their very best to turn their dis-
coveries to good account, and they deserve all
praise.

They have made war with marshy land all
over the isthmus, and heaven knows how much
that means in those seventy-five kilometres of
virgin forest. No water is allowed to stagnate
there ! It is forced to keep running all the time.
The result is truly wonderful ; not a single case
of yellow fever has appeared in Panama since
1905 ! This tropical cemetery has become one

83

The Fair Land of Central America

i

of the healthiest towns or, if you prefer, one
of the least unhealthy along the shores of the
Pacific.

The fame of nations depends upon little things !
If the yellow-fever mosquito had been discovered
ten years earlier, the French would not have died
like flies. The Canal would have been finished
by them and not by the United States. The
fate of the Latin race would have been quite
different !

General Bonaparte wrote on the eve of the
i8th Brumaire : " Help me to deliver France
from her legal oppressors ! '' Every South Ameri-
can general who wants to try his hand at being a
dictator says the same thing. He always promises
to put an end to the present state of red-tapeism
and verbose anarchy by a powerful government
which will act and not talk. But as the result
of these acts only ends in the dictator filling his
own pockets, people soon begin again to prefer
words to deeds.

In no matter what part of the world you may be,
if you see three men talking together in a public
place, you can guess what they are talking about

84

Panama

by their nationality. In Germany they talk of
the army ; in Russia they talk of bureaucrats ;
in England they talk sport ; in the United States
they talk business ; in Monaco they talk of rou-
lette ; in France we talk of women ; and in Turkey
they talk of nothing at all.

At a dinner-party the German talks of what
he thinks ; the Frenchman talks of what he
likes best ; the Englishman of what he wants ;
and the Belgian of what he is eating. But the
Central Americans never talk of anything but
politics. What else would you have them talk
of ? Of art, science, or literature ? They possess
neither artists nor savants, and their literature,
which is too absolutely unenterprising to tackle
such serious subjects as history, romance, or
drama, contents itself with blossoming out from
time to time into sentimental poetry, that most
monotonous branch of literature when it does
not awaken deep echoes in the world of thought
and action. It is only too easy to explain this
intellectual poverty in the Spanish-American
by saying that it is a question of nationality
and geography. The race, from the time of Cer-
vantes and Velasquez, has done less than any

85

The Fair Land of Central America

other nation for the general welfare of Europe.
Their country is a huge continent, sparsely
populated, with a trying climate. The race and
the locality are evidently unfavourable to the
development of superior intellectual culture.

The younger members of the legal, commercial
and medical professions in Central America have
already made great strides. They compare
favourably with the members of similar pro-
fessions in Europe. But then they are mostly
educated over here, for the greater number of
them come to finish their studies in France,
while several go to Switzerland and a few to
Belgium.

Only on returning to their far-away little
capitals, to Caracas, Lima, and Bogota, these
half-cultivated men have too little to do — either
because there is no competition or else because
business is slack — and too many inducements
to spend their leisure hours in trying to govern
the republic. It is easy for a young and ambitious
man to climb to the top of the tree ; and when
he gets there, he can pretty well do what he likes.
Who would dare to gainsay the dictator ? Has
a dictator ever allowed himself to be thwarted ?

86

Panama

The past is one long record of revolution and
anarchy. Can public opinion check him ? Public
opinion is represented by rabid partisans and
merciless adversaries. Neither disinterested judges
nor sacred principles exist ! Everyone has a right
to be a despot, and everyone has a right to revolt
if he feels inclined to do so.

The constitution favours this state of anarchy.
In choosing between the Republic as we under-
stand that institution in France, where the
deputies are all-important and the president of
no account, and the Republic of the United
States, where the senators count as something,
but where the president, who is elected by the
nation, enjoys far more power, the old Spanish
colonies decided in favour of the latter. New
countries need a powerful person at the head of
affairs. But while in North America the general
state of prosperity and the excellent standard
of public education are unfavourable to any
attempts at despotism, in South America, where
the deputies only meet from time to time, the
man who can manage to keep at the top of
the tree is all-powerful, can give all the best
berths and positions to his relations and sup-

87

The Fair Land of Central America

porters, and becomes a despot for the time
being and tries to remain so for the rest of his
life.

Such a thing is often possible ; at least, the
president always tries to become a dictator.
That is why revolutions break out as regularly
as flowers bloom in spring ; some of these revo-
lutions are fomented by the president himself
in order to keep at the top of the tree after his
term of office is at an end ; others are fomented
by his rivals who want to push him off the
nest.

The elections are a perfect farce. The president
then in office manages, either by threats or by
strategy, to keep the electors away from the
ballot-boxes. In Mexico, Porfirio Diaz* spies
keep everything in their own hands. In Colombia
each of Reyes* agents has eight or ten votes.
In Ecuador the present president refuses to
submit to the people's wishes as expressed
by the elections. In Venezuela, Castro does
not even take the trouble to get himself re-
elected.

Czarism has been termed " monarchy tempered
by assassination." We may say of the South

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American governments that they represent des-
potism tempered by a call to arms. As the man
is, so is his system of government. In the case
of Porfirio Diaz, who is a clever old gentleman,
it answers admirably ; but when a two-legged
brute, who only thinks of lining his own pockets,
gets the power into his own hands, it becomes
a terrible weapon of destruction. As men of
genius are scarce and brutes swarm, it may be
considered a failure on the whole.

The young republic of Panama elects her first
regular president next July ; x for Don Amador
Guerrero, who had reigned for the last four
years, was nominated by politicians who pro-
claimed the nation independent without first
consulting that nation's wishes.

Don Amador does not intend to offer himself
again as a candidate ; it is not often that a presi-
dent willingly descends from his elevated perch !
The fact that he is seventy-five years of age
explains a good deal.

The struggle will be a keen one. Each candidate

i The election, thanks to the presence of the American troops,
came off at the appointed date and was undisturbed by any
rioting.

The Fair Land of Central America

has a family to provide for, and what a family !
Most people out there have ten or twelve children.
As the years go by, the head of the family usually
finds himself the proud possessor of one hundred
grandchildren. When grandpapa becomes presi-
dent, those grandchildren take possession of the
republic ! All the most comfortable berths, all
the nice little pickings and perquisites, all the
delightful diplomatic missions abroad when a
great deal of pleasure is combined with precious
little work, are given to those grandchildren.
That means wealth for one half of Panama and
ruin for the other.

It was a question of life and death before the
Yankees came to the isthmus, for the two factions
invariably flew to arms. As to the ruin, it was
so complete, the winning party knew so perfectly
well how to pluck its victims, that the Spanish-
American inhabitants of Panama have made it
a habit only to buy such furniture as is absolutely
necessary — beds, tables, chairs. Even in the
best houses one sees no luxuries, no unnecessary
ornaments. You may go into the homes of rich
families who have lived there for four centuries,
and you think yourself in the temporary hut of

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some emigrant who only arrived in the city
yesterday.

The police of the American Canal will see that
the elections this time are, if not perfectly square,
at least peaceable. One cannot expect more
even from the United States.

The Yankee politician's electoral device is :
" Cheat, but don't break each other's heads ! "
This system seems to answer so well in the great
northern republic that the little southern re-
publics would do well to make up their minds to
adopt it.

The Neapolitan lazzaroni are proverbially lazy.
But they only represent a certain portion of the
population. The other inhabitants, those thou-
sands of workers such as cab-drivers, vine-dressers,
gardeners, fishermen, pedlars, vendors of coral
and macaroni, who dwell on the shores of that
enchanting bay, work and work hard.

If you want to see a race which does nothing, a
nation which seems entirely given over to laziness,
you must go to Spanish America.

The inhabitants of Panama strike one as being
particularly lazy, because Panama at first gives

9

The Fair Land of Central America

one the impression of being a very busy place.
Some of the houses are built as if they were
meant to last ; they were built by Frenchmen.
The streets are well paved and water-pipes have
been laid down ; these are the work of the Ameri-
cans. The banks belong to Jews, and the
shops are kept by Chinamen. One even sees
workmen and labourers ; the latter are usually
negroes.

But take away all the foreigners, the new-
comers. Try and find out what the native of
Panama does to occupy himself, that is to say
the Spaniard, of more or less mixed blood, who
has owned the land for the last four centuries,
perpetuates his race with the fecundity of the
rabbit, is one with the land as the horseman is
one with his trusty steed, as rust on iron, in-
fluencing it for better or for worse according to
his good or bad qualities. What do the people
of Panama do ? Nothing, or, at least, as little
as it is possible for people to do who have to
feed and clothe themselves ! Of what does
their food consist ? Bananas grow by the road-
side, fish swarm in the bay (Panama, in the Indian
language, means rich in fish).

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It costs more to dress oneself. Men may do
without shirt-collars and wear the same pair of
filthy trousers ; women may wear the same shabby
black skirt ; but the day comes when the shirt
or the pair of old shoes, inherited from some re-
mote ancestor, fall off you piece by piece and
you are obliged to replace them.

The population of Panama, realizing this un-
fortunate necessity, occasionally consents to do
a few odd jobs.

The women become dressmakers or servant-
maids. Oh, Parisian hostesses, who complain
of your cooks ! go and see the cooks of
Panama ! Do your domestics grumble when
you invite a few friends to lunch or dinner ?
The cooks out there don't grumble ; they just
give warning !

" I should like to entertain a little and to be
able to give a few dinners ! " a lady belonging
to the foreign colony confided to me. " But
if I were so foolish as to tell my cook that I had
invited some friends to dinner this evening,
she would leave me before nightfall. She is
engaged to cook for the family ; she does not
intend to give herself any extra work. So, as

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The Fair Land of Central America

we have to get everything from the hotel, the
shortest and easiest way to entertain one's
friends is to invite them there."

Neither cook nor chamber-maid will consent
to sleep under your roof. The servants desert
you at night. But the most remarkable creature
is the dressmaker whom you engage by the day.
I know all about her, for I myself engaged a
certain damsel whom I shall ever remember
as the very incarnation of industry in Panama.
I had had no end of trouble to unearth her and
had hunted in vain for a whole fortnight. She
had to mend some underclothing which had
been torn by the unutterably awful laundresses.
At last one woman, who was more industrious
or poorer than her sisters, agreed to come and
sew for one dollar a day.

But her ideas concerning the meaning of an
ordinary day's work were most peculiar. She
did not put in an appearance until after her
dinner-hour, that is to say about two o'clock
in the afternoon, and she departed punctually
at five o'clock. She explained to me that it
was too hot to work in the morning. A white
senora is afraid of getting sunburnt. I had to

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Panama

acquiesce, although it seemed to me that her
chocolate complexion ran no risk of being spoiled
by the sun.

She arrived, sank down on a chair with an
air of utter exhaustion, drew the work towards
her which she had commenced on the previous
afternoon, and took a few stitches with an ex-
pression on her countenance as if she were too
feeble and limp to do anything. Then she sud-
denly produced a fan from her pocket and began
to fan herself, while she sleepily examined the
room and its occupants. However, she did not
fall asleep, but took up her work again from
time to time. At five o'clock she actually dis-
played a little energy and almost went off in a
hurry without taking the trouble, however, to
tidy anything. She called a cab in order to reach
her home, which was a few minutes' walk from
our hotel. The cab cost her the fifth part of the
hard-earned dollar. But what can you expect ?
There is a limit to human endurance !

However, I was very pleased with my find.
She was the only seamstress in Panama ! And
I feel deeply grateful to her.

As to the men, they manage to make those

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The Fair Land of Central America

necessary articles which even the most primitive
town can hardly do without. They make clumsy
copies of European goods, ask a fancy price for
the same, and take a month to finish what we can
do in a day's work. If you try to make them
hurry, they reply, " Manana ! " l

Manana ! In the shop, in the office, no matter
where you go, no matter what you require, the
reply is the same. It is the land of Manana.

Such is the life of these thin, sallow-faced
people ; so thin and so sallow are they, that one
feels a brute for expecting such limp-looking
creatures to do anything at all. So when I
say that the natives of Panama are lazy, I
hesitate whether I ought to attribute their in-
dolence to the South American race in general
or rather to the anaemia and malaria-breeding
climate.

The population has evidently lost all its vim
and energy. Any resistance against the hordes of
sturdy, hustling Yankees who come here to work
on the Canal is out of the question. Those great
fresh-complexioned, square-jawed fellows with
their brawny legs encased in leather gaiters could

1 Mafiana : to-morrow.

Panama

gobble up the republic's three hundred thousand
inhabitants at one mouthful, and take possession
of the land before the natives knew what they
were after.

If Central America only consisted of towns like
Panama, the question as to whether the Latin
races would resist would have been solved, and
I should have been able to take the next boat
back to Europe, abandoning the New World to
the tender mercies of Chicago storekeepers.

But Panama is the junction, the trysting-
place of many races ; and all these races use
Panama as a sort of dumping-ground for their
cripples and good-for-nothings, which said cripples
and good-for-nothings have married and inter-
married to such good effect that Panama con-
stitutes quite the most extraordinary zoological
garden on the face of the globe. I cannot recom-
mend it as the best place in which to study the
human race.

But in Costa Rica and Mexico I was able to
form an opinion of the Spanish-Americans.

Panama possesses an old cathedral and a
brand-new theatre ; both buildings are equally
G 97

The Fair Land of Central America

uninteresting. But the bishop of the cathedral
and the manager of the theatre are interesting in
that very funny adventures sometimes happen
to them. It is the country's fault for being so
small ; it was only born yesterday, and it is not
quite sure if it will still be alive to-morrow,
because it only came into existence in order to
bring forth that colossus, the Canal, the infant
which perhaps will devour its mother in the near
future ! The principality of Monaco, which only
lives by its roulette, is another instance of the
same thing. The big-wigs of these Lilliputian
States have to put up with a bad job.

I heard el senor obispo say mass in his cathedral
during Holy Week. This tall, thin, bald-headed,
long-nosed individual looked rather distinguished
in his faded purple robes while he held out his
ring for the faithful to kiss. Unfortunately the
cathedral was full of dogs. It is the only cool
place in the town, and as mass is said with the
doors wide open, the canine population is most
assiduous in its attendance. All the hideous
curs which lie about, and rove through the red-
hot streets, gladly run to cool themselves under
the dark arches.

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Panama

They slumber peacefully, undisturbed by the
music and the lights, undisturbed by the faithful
who are few and far between. It would almost
seem as if they enjoyed going to church. They
are interesting converts to Catholicism ; how-
ever, they do not seem to arouse much interest
in the breasts of the other worshippers, for, with
the exception of these dogs, even on Easter
Sunday I could only count ten white people in
church. The congregation was composed of
about one hundred coloured people. But Spanish-
Americans are by no means all equally devout.
They are very devout in Mexico and Colombia,
the capital of which, Bogota, a town of eighty
thousand inhabitants, boasts of two thousand
priests and monks. But the other States profess
to believe in nothing ; most of them have banished
the monastic orders.

Fate was once very unkind to the poor Bishop
of Panama. Mr. Roosevelt paid an official visit
to the Canal last year. A cablegram was sent
mentioning the names of certain persons in
Panama whom the President of the United
States wished to invite to visit him on his
ironclad. This cablegram mentioned the big-

99

The Fair Land of Central America

wigs of the republic, two or three important
private men interested in the Canal and
" Bishop."

Whereupon someone hurried off to inform
Monseigneur that Mr. Roosevelt was very anxious
to see him. The bishop, rather surprised but
delighted to hear this piece of news, quickly
put on his best clothes and hastened to join the
other distinguished guests. The party took the
train for Colon, crossed the isthmus, got into
a gaily-decorated boat, and soon began to go
up the side of the ironclad upon which Mr.
Roosevelt was standing, awaiting his guests. The
President, on seeing a gentleman in a purple cloak
climbing up the side, looked rather surprised,
bowed, and then glanced round at the assembled
guests, and asked for " Bishop."
" Bishop ? Why, there he is, sir ! "
Alas ! Bishop was the name of an American
employed on the Canal, a personal friend of Mr.
Roosevelt. The Bishop of Panama had never
been invited ! All the same he was kindly re-
ceived, but the day must have seemed very long
to the unfortunate prelate, who only spoke
Spanish and who walked about looking very

100

Panama

disconsolate and strangely out of his element
on that heretical ironclad.

This same town which, when it belonged to
Colombia four years ago, had neither paved roads
nor water-pipes, absolutely wallows in wealth
now that it is in the hands of the United States,
and has built itself a theatre of stone with some
pretensions to beauty. The architecture might
be called Italian Renaissance if the fagade were
not adorned by a rather startling eruption of
Gothic gargoyles ; however, it is not bad. It
cost, together with the President's house which
adjoins it, one and a half million francs — a mere
nothing. An artist, a native of Panama now living
in Paris, received one hundred thousand francs
for decorating the ceiling and the green-room.
This ceiling, on which is depicted the quadriga
of Apollo ascending into clouds adorned by
beautiful women, is executed in the style of the
ceiling of the Opera-Comique in Paris, and shows
much taste and good drawing ; it is quite a work
of art.

But when one possesses such a beautiful theatre
with such a magnificent ceiling, one longs to make
use of it. A manager was appointed and received

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The Fair Land of Central America

seventy-five thousand francs to go to Europe
to engage a first-rate company, " numbering one
hundred artistes," the newspapers stated, " who
will give twenty operatic performances ! "

Seventy-five thousand francs for one hundred
artistes was not much, only just enough to pay the
voyage from Europe to America, there and back !
So the manager wisely contented himself with
going to Havana where he engaged an operatic
company which was performing in that town.
These artistes accepted on condition that they
gave the twenty operas in succession and that they
only remained in Panama one month at the very
longest.

It had to be ! The theatre-goers of Panama
heroically prepared to go to the opera every night
for one month, knowing that they would not have
the opportunity of going again for a whole year.
The boxes, which cost fifteen hundred francs,
were eagerly snapped up. On the night before the
troupe was expected to arrive there was not a
single box to be had. Young ladies toiled all day
long over their costumes. The opening night was
to be something quite unprecedented.

Alas ! that night was not to be ! The company

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Panama

never turned up. The manager, pale, disconcerted,
appeared all alone on the stage, holding a cable-
gram in his hand ; another impresario had got
at the artistes, who one and all pretended
that they were suffering from a mysterious
epidemic and declined the seventy-five thousand
francs !

It was a cruel blow ! The ballet-dancers, who
had already arrived by an Italian steamer, had to
be shipped off again, and the gorgeous costumes
hung up in their wardrobes ! A cabinet council
was summoned in order to consider the situation ;
the latter is still being considered, and the theatre
is still closed. From time to time some of the
richest citizens invite one another to come and
see the beautiful ceiling, which is then illuminated
for five minutes, " so that people can see what
it looks like by artificial light."

But the stage is left in darkness ; it would be
too depressing to turn on the lights with no play
and no players !

France, after having spent too much time and
money on the Panama Canal, now seems to have
forgotten that it ever existed. The reason is

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The Fair Land of Central America

that she no longer possesses any interest in the
Canal. There, as elsewhere, we sold our birthright
for a mess of pottage ; in the case of Panama we
acted wisely, for the Canal had ceased to be worth
anything in our hands.

But the corpses of thousands of gentils Franfais,
and from seven to eight millions of our good
money, lie in the red clay of that cutting. And
the Americans, after feeling about in the dark for
four years, are now adopting the dead men's
plans in order to finish the task begun by them.
So, though the Stars and Stripes may float in
proud isolation on that day when the waters of
the two oceans rush for the first time into the
Canal, all eyes will behold the French flag, like
a pale wraith of what might have been, waving
behind the banner of the United States

How far have they got at present ?

They are hard at work. And what a work it
is ! and what a strange and wonderful sight
it is !

The conquistador Nunez de Balboa took four
weeks to cut a road through the impenetrable
virgin forest which then covered the entire isth-
mus. All that happened four centuries ago, and

104

Panama

the isthmus is still covered by that forest. It
is with great difficulty that the railway can
protect itself from the ever-encroaching tide of
vegetation.

But the forest of Panama has become a strange
sort of forest. Here and there in the underwood
one comes across a locomotive half buried in the
thick grass. A palm tree grows out of the funnel
and waves its green plumes to and fro. Bind-
weed and creepers have taken possession of whole
rows of railway cars which were once shunted on
to a siding. A little farther on a huge iron machine,
painted blood-red and looking like one of the
strange beasts described in the Apocalypse, thrusts
its paraphernalia of teeth and claws through the
branches of the trees. It is a dredging-machine
which was once washed away by a flood and
stranded here. A few hundred years hence
somebody will discover it and will think it some
horrible relic of the Spanish Inquisition.

These are the waifs and strays of the French
Canal. In other places one finds heaps of rusty,
bent, twisted and broken iron which look as if
some dreadful disaster, such as an inundation,
had taken place.

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The Fair Land of Central America

My readers must not think that the Yankees
despised our machinery, but they had to widen
the old railway track in order to run their newly-
invented one hundred ton locomotives. They
are still using such of our plant as they can,
for they find it most reliable. The chief engineer,
Colonel Goethaels, showed me some old French
drills which were working away at a fine pace :
" They are twenty years old, but they are ten
times better than those which they send us from
America nowadays."

I climbed down into the celebrated Culebra
Cut. Batches of negroes were working away
under the tropical sun. Rows of drills were drawn
up in battle array, and we heard muffled sounds
of dynamite exploding inside the hill. Steam-
shovels were hard at work behind us. Their long
steel fangs were gnawing away at a perpendicular
cliff of red clay. The iron jaw scratches and
devours, describes half a circle, spits out its mouth-
ful of soil into dirt-cars, and then returns to gnaw
away at the apparently inexhaustible mountain
of tufa. The plucky little insect intends to devour
that mountain.

It is only a question of time and dollars. The

106

Panama

chief engineer assured me that the Canal would
be finished by 1915 ; some disinterested experts
say not before 1920. It costs the United States
forty million dollars a year. Thirty thousand
workmen work eight hours a day ; of these men,
twenty-five thousand are negroes who earn six
francs a day, three thousand are Spaniards who
earn eight francs, and the others are Americans,
all of whom are mechanics or overseers, the least
of whom receives at least seven hundred and fifty
francs a month.

These wages were fixed when the Canal was
begun by the French. But the staff is splendidly
paid in true Yankee fashion ! Colonel Goethaels
receives, besides his colonel's pay which is fifteen
thousand francs, one hundred and seventy-five
thousand francs a year. His four subordinates
receive seventy-five thousand. There are also
one hundred officers of the American army
who must find engineering a more paying job
than fighting the Japanese in a mountainous
country.

The Japanese ! — ah ! that is another important
point to be settled in this problem. The
Americans' reason for making the Panama Canal

107

The Fair Land of Central America

was that it might be used for military purposes.
It cannot pay its expenses unless it makes the
boats pay their weight in gold, which would have
the effect of making them immediately take the
old route by Cape Horn. And that is why
we acted wisely when we relinquished our
scheme.

But if the Japanese were to beat the United
States' squadron, the tables would be turned, the
Canal would be at their mercy, and the gate of
the Pacific would then become the gate of New
York!

That is why Panama is full of yellow spies. The
French consul told me the following typical
anecdote : He, together with a Japanese captain
who was then travelling in the service of his
country, happened to be blockaded in Havana,
when that town was being besieged by the Ameri-
cans. The Japanese officer, a jolly, delightful,
well-educated little creature, often dined with
him. No one could forget his face when they
had once seen it, for his forehead was marked by
a long scar from a blow which he had received
during the Chinese war. A short time ago our
consul happened to take the train to Panama.

1 08

Panama

At each station wretched Chinese pedlars came
to the windows of the car and offered cigars or fans
to the passengers. Whom did he recognize
among them ? The Japanese captain with his
scar !

The yellow-fever mosquito has disappeared.
But there is another yellow mosquito who is
biding his time until the Canal is finished, and then
he will go to work.

One thing alone can prevent the completion
of the Canal at the date fixed : and that is an
inundation. The Rio Chagres is often in flood,
and has obliged the Americans to dam up a valley
a mile wide — truly a task worthy of the time of
the Pharaohs ! and perhaps of the Danaides,
too ! . . . For when the dam is completed no
one knows whether the water will not filter
through, or flow over the walls. It will have to
take its chance.

The French plans, either less foolhardy or more
cautious, avoided this dam by a long detour.
Let us hope that the Yankees, who always seem
to come to grief when they try to modify our
plans, will be more lucky this time, for they deserve
to succeed.

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The Fair Land of Central America

The task of boring through mountains and
damming up rivers in the tropics is a difficult
one.

The American engineers' wives and families
have a hard life of it, for they are scorched by the
sun, soaked by diluvial rains, stung by mosquitoes,
and obliged to live on tinned food. It is true that
the scenery is very beautiful. But venerable
trees and magnificent sunsets, orchid-like butter-
flies and butterfly-orchids, luminous insects whose
bodies shine at night like Chinese lanterns, boa-
constrictors and crocodiles twenty-four feet long,
all those sights which at first astonish one soon
become as familiar to the eye as a cabbage-patch.
They live very lonely lives, eat salted food, drink
lukewarm water, and yawn all day long. . . .

For the last time I passed in the manager's
own little private car through this human ant-hill,
among this population which toils and slaves
on those seventy-five kilometres of land, that
narrow red ribbon which stands out in such vivid
contrast against the green forest.

Other races dwell there besides the Spaniards
and the negroes. The chief of the police force,
who accompanied me, told me that he knew of

no

Panama

fifty-four different nationalities from all parts of
the world. It is quite like the tower of Babel !

It appears that they live more peaceably than
in the old days before the flood. However, we
met gangs of wretched convicts dragging their
chains under the ever- watchful eye of their gigantic
guardians, splendid fellows in khaki uniforms.
These convicts are employed to break stones.
They talk of re-establishing the penalty of death
by hanging on the gallows.

The soil, when dug up, is found to contain
myriads of sea-shells. Nature — or, who knows,
some long forgotten race ? — once dug a canal
between the two oceans, but it closed as, perhaps,
it will do again some day.

With all our knowledge and all our ingenuity,
what are we after all ? Little children playing
on the beach with spades and buckets between
two tides.

The main point, in short, is that the Panama
Canal will be opened eventually. Why is the
Yankee going to succeed where the Frenchman
failed ?

Science and machinery are altogether out of

in

The Fair Land of Central America

the question, for the Americans, after having
despised our plans and rejected them as worthless,
have now made up their minds to carry them out
religiously ; and then the French plant, although
twenty years old, still works far better than similar
machinery made but yesterday in the United
States.

Is it a case of better management ? Every-
body knows that confusion and waste existed on
the isthmus in de Lesseps' time. But although
the Americans may be more methodical, they are
perhaps more wasteful. They have got plenty of
archbishops' sons and young officials, who want
to get rich as quickly as possible. The com-
missariat, for instance, is suspected of making
a very good thing out of Panama. Here is another
example : The post of superintendent on the
railway between Colon and Panama, a post which
consists in collecting the ticket-money, and for
which a ticket-collector on a tramway in Europe
would earn five francs a day, is supposed to be
worth one hundred thousand francs to its lucky
possessor, who has to control much traffic and
many passengers, but who himself is controlled
by no one. When this humble employe goes back

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Panama

to Panama by the last train at seven o'clock at
night, he leaves his cap in the railway station and
puts on a straw hat like any other gentleman,
dresses himself in a white suit and goes to dine
with his wife at the only fashionable hotel in the
town. The shareholders in the American rail-
roads are really very forbearing ! But the fact is
that the trains out there are so fond of running
off the lines that perhaps ticket-collectors are
supposed to run great risks. If they manage
to save their own lives, public opinion considers
that they are entitled to pocket half the profits.

So Americans are neither more clever nor more
conscientious than the French. But they are not
likely to be wrecked on the rock which was the
latter' s ruin ; their success does not depend upon
stocks and shares — their canal is a military
undertaking — and they no longer dread the yellow
fever.

As officials paid by the War Office, they are sure
to receive every year the two hundred millions
destined to defray all expenses incurred by the
building of the Canal. But, above all, they are sure
that they will not die out there. It is interesting
to hear the few survivors of the French Company
H 113

The Fair Land of Central America

relate what Panama was like in the time of the
yellow fever, that dreadful malady which used
to break out unexpectedly and carry off its victims
in a few hours ! The French died like flies. From
the chief engineer to the humblest workman, no
one was sure whether he would be alive on the
morrow. And so they tried to forget the danger
by drinking and gambling.

The Cathedral Square at Panama, that little
sleepy square which now looks so respectable, was
filled every night with drunken, half-crazy groups
of revellers. When the dancing-saloons and
gambling-dens lit their lamps, everyone used to
rush and throw their last farthing on the green
baize roulette-table. What was the good of hoard-
ing money when the hospital nurses were in the
habit of stealing hard-earned savings from under
the dying patient's pillow ? The workmen on the
Canal had to pass the cemetery on their way
home every night ; all those white-wood pegs,
bearing the names and the registered numbers
of the dead men in black letters, looked like a
ghastly game of dominoes, and seemed to say :
Whose turn next ?

The discovery of the infernal microbe and its

114

Panama

destruction by draining its breeding-ground —
the marshes — sufficed to reassure the terrified
city. The climate is still debilitating, and very
few people manage to escape an occasional attack
of malaria. But if a great many negroes and
Spanish workmen still die there, the American
population has learnt to keep in good health.

When twilight comes, and with it the hour when
toil ceases, when long trains filled with workmen
move off laden with their variegated burden of
human cattle towards the scattered caravansaries
along the line, the Yankee engineer or overseer
climbs up to his little wooden shanty on the hill.
There behind the wire gauze which protects the
veranda from mosquitoes, a rose-coloured Chinese
lantern was lighted as soon as the first stars began
to awake in the heavens ; it tells him that the
soup is smoking on the table and that his white-
robed wife is swinging to and fro in her rocking-
chair. That home, half tent, half barn, doesn't
look as if it could stand much wind and rain.
How isolated it seems at the edge of the forest,
surrounded by almost uncultivated land ! The
man thinks of her who consented to follow him and
to dwell — for many a long year, perhaps — behind

The Fair Land of Central America

those ugly plank walls. He feels a lump rising in
his throat ; his eyes fill with tears and he swears
that he will make his pile, and a jolly big one,
too!

That is why the Americans will be able to
finish the Panama Canal.

116

COSTA RICA

The first international court of arbitration — How people travel
in Costa Rica — Two-legged and four-legged fellow-passengers
— The most beautiful forest in the world — A feathered re-
public— The real habitat of the orchid — The capital of Costa
Rica — Fashions among the female population — A lucky
accident — Midnight marriages — A priest with seven daugh-
ters— Why are they always fighting in Costa Rica ? — Strange
French officers — Mr. Carnegie's five hundred thousand francs
— Presidential pastimes — Abortive attempt to assassinate
Cabrera, President of Guatemala — An illiterate president —
Fragonard's Swing — The case of Father Pages — An expensive
and useless theatre — The Madonnas of Perugino — Romance
in Costa Rica — The Yankee will conquer the whole of Central
America in a quarter of a century — Five incapable chario-
teers— Country life in the tropics — A garden of Eden.

THE five republics of Central America situated
between Panama and Mexico, that is to say :
Costa Rica, Nicaragua, San Salvador, Honduras,
and Guatemala, have just come to a decision which
proves, not only that the United States are exer-
cising undue pressure on those countries, but that
the five republics realize that the time has come
for them to resist with all their might and main ;

117

The Fair Land of Central America

and so Latin America has determined to stand
up to Anglo-Saxon America.

Europe cannot afford to ignore this gigantic
duel. When once the Yankees begin to dictate
their commands to the whole of the New World,
from Canada to the Straits of Magellan, that day
will see the ruin of European commercial enter-
prise and import trade. London, Antwerp, Ham-
burg, Bordeaux, and Genoa will find that the
New World has slipped out of their grasp for the
second time.

The Spaniards, for three centuries, were in the
habit of capturing any foreign vessels foolhardy
enough to approach their colonies beyond-seas.
When a storm threw these ships out of their course,
the Spaniards seized them and sent their crews
to rot in dungeons. The Yankees will not be
obliged to employ such forcible means. A pro-
hibitive tariff will suffice to clear the Atlantic
of any other flag than the Stars and Stripes. We
should do well to remember that fact.

So the five tiny States, who are anxious to
escape the fate which befell Panama, have just
inaugurated the nucleus of a federation, by
founding in Costa Rica, which is the most go-ahead

118

Costa Rica

of the five republics, a court of arbitration, a sort
of Amphictyon Council, whose decrees are to be
respected by the whole of Central America. The
United States do not seem to have opposed this
federal institution. They probably think that it
will serve their interests, while the Central Ameri-
cans think that it will serve as a shield against
their powerful neighbours. The future will prove
who was right.

I left Panama in a hurry, because I wanted to
assist at the grand fetes which were to celebrate
the inauguration of this court of arbitration in
the capital of Costa Rica. It was but a short
journey, just as if one went from Belgium into
Holland ; only as you cannot traverse the thick
forests with which the isthmus is covered, you
have to go round by sea. The voyage only lasts
two days, but what a voyage it is ! As one has to
face more or less the same discomforts and dangers
whenever one wants to go from one capital to
another in those parts, and as those discomforts
represent the most serious obstacle to the forma-
tion of a gigantic central State, I will relate my
adventures during that voyage.

Costa Rica, like Panama, stretches across the

119

The Fair Land of Central America

isthmus and possesses two ports, one on the
Pacific coast and another on the Atlantic. But
the latter port alone is connected with the capital
by a railroad. So, first of all, I had to cross the
Isthmus of Panama in order to return and take
ship at Colon, from which port boats leave for
Costa Rica.

I hardly closed my eyes the night before start-
ing, for the train left Panama at six o'clock next
morning, and I dared not trust the negro who had
promised to call me in good time. Unfortunately,
my luggage had to be carried to the station by
negroes. You need never be surprised at what
a nigger will do ; you may be quite sure that every-
thing will go all wrong. And that was just what
happened ; they were late fetching my luggage,
and the train steamed out of the station under
my very nose.

Alas ! the boat from Colon to Costa Rica would
weigh anchor without me ! I was told that I should
have to wait until the following week. ... No !
I then learnt that, by taking a train which started
four hours later, I might still hope to arrive
before the boat started. My niggers swore that I
should have a good half-hour in which to get from

1 20

Costa Rica

the train to the landing-stage, which is two
minutes' walk from the] railway-station. So I
determined to chance it. If I missed the boat,
I could but return that night to Panama ; the
railway journey across the isthmus is so very
cheap ! I only had to pay eighty francs for those
seventy-five kilometres — a mere nothing !

By the mercy of Providence, I reached Colon at
one o'clock. The boat started at half-past one.
But as you are not allowed to take your ticket on
board ship, I had to go to the Company's office
and take my tickets there. I hurried off, while a
negro gentleman, grinning from ear to ear behind
his huge collar, pledged me his word of honour in
three languages — English, French, and Spanish —
that my trunks would be conveyed from the lug-
gage-van to the boat as if they were being wafted
on the wings of a zephyr.

My readers are probably astonished at my
anxiety concerning my luggage ; but they will
understand my feelings when they learn that
everything in those parts is imported from Europe
at great expense by shopkeepers who are obliged
to pay very heavy duty and yet who expect to
make their fortunes in three years. Thus at Chili

121

The Fair Land of Central America

one has to pay seventy-five francs for a pair of
shoes. It is just as well when you have to pay
such prices to try not to scatter your boots as you
go along through life.

On reaching the Steamship Company's office,
I found that I only had to pay down my money,
which does not take long to do in any country.
Having got what I wanted, I hurried off to the
landing-stage, there to await my black commis-
sioner with his huge collar, his three languages,
and my mountain of luggage.

The boat for Costa Rica was puffing away im-
patiently by the side of the quay. It was a fruit
boat, used for exporting bananas. Passengers
are only taken as extras. It was very small and
rather dirty than otherwise. Its few cabins were
already engaged. The captain explained to me in
four languages — one extra, because he was a
Norwegian — that one can sleep quite comfortably
on deck in the tropics.

Suddenly it began to rain. That means that
two minutes later the water was up to my ankles,
and that the lane down which my unfortunate
luggage had to come was changed into a mountain
torrent. I saw that it was all up with me. Unless

122

Costa Rica

dolphins came and dragged my nigger's cart like
the shell of Amphitrite I should never get away
from Colon that day. The boat began to weigh
anchor. It was all up with me. The Norwegian
captain expressed his opinion that perhaps my
coloured gentleman was a thief. ... He had
probably hidden my luggage in the negro quarter of
Colon, which quarter is so disgustingly dirty that
no white person likes even to pass through it.
It is inhabited by an extraordinary population
of rascals, the scum of the four corners of the
earth.

The rain grew worse and worse ; one could not
call it rain. It was like a second ocean suspended
in the sky and pouring down on to the quays
with the roar of a thousand Niagaras. As I had
given up all hopes of being able to leave with my
baggage, I told them to take off my small luggage
which had already been piled on deck.

Someone then flung me my portmanteaux and
a glass-covered butterfly-case, containing several
fine specimens. I had been expressly recom-
mended to buy a butterfly collection when I went
to Panama. You would do well to impress upon
your friends that they always ought to buy

123

The Fair Land of Central America

collections of butterflies whenever they go to
America ! They are so easy to carry !

Oh ! wonder of wonders ! my trunks suddenly
hove in sight ! A marvellous-looking animal,
with a mule's head — and dolphin's fins, probably —
thrust its nose above the torrent, dragging a cart
whereon I beheld my heaviest boxes piled on the
top of the smallest and weakest packages. The
only trunk which had a hole in it — I had tried in
vain to get it repaired in Panama — had been care-
fully placed on the top of the pyramid, so that it
might catch every drop of rain. For this exhi-
bition of ingenuity my coloured gentleman in his
tall collar, who was only an hour late, demanded
the modest sum of one hundred francs — dirt
cheap ! I paid and went on board the boat, which
had been detained by this providential storm.

The rain stopped. We started. I had only
lost my butterfly-case and probably the contents
of my dilapidated trunk, two packages out of
twenty, hardly ten per cent. At that rate I could
afford to stop at ten American towns before being
absolutely shoeless and coatless.

The sea was calm — luckily ! For we were ten
passengers, packed together in a saloon which was

124

Costa Rica

meant to hold six or seven. If any of us had be-
come sea-sick, I should have had to fly. There
was only one class. My next-door neighbour
at supper, who, from the state of his hands and his
shirt-collar, must have been employed in some very
dirty trade, drank his coffee out of his saucer and
wiped his fingers on the tablecloth. When night
fell, they found a berth for me in a cabin which was
already occupied by three Chinamen. Those
Chinese were very clean and did not smell of
opium 1 However, the atmosphere in that badly-
ventilated cabin was too much for me ; I felt
myself slowly melting away in my berth. Fearing
lest I should disappear from the face of the earth
and only leave a pool of water to mark my
passage, I tore myself away from that haven of
refuge and went up into the open air, which I
found unpleasantly fresh. You are warned to keep
awake, if you don't want to get an attack of
pneumonia. A splendid moon enabled me to
witness the innocent gambols of myriads of cock-
roaches and rats. At daybreak, we cast anchor in
front of a low-lying coast, covered with palm trees ;
this was the shore of Costa Rica. I saw a yellow
flag fluttering on a little island to the left. It was

125

The Fair Land of Central America

there that we had to go through quarantine.
Every American port is guarded by a lazaretto,
where passengers frequently run the risk of
having to spend a week of isolation, favourable
to pious meditations, no doubt, but calculated
to prolong the journey. My boat, by a lucky
chance, had not touched at any plague-stricken
ports. So I was allowed to land, pay the custom-
house fees, pay the luggage porters, pay for my
railway tickets, and finally seat myself in the car
which was to take me that night to San Jose,
the capital of the Republic of Costa Rica. How-
ever, the station-master warned me that, as rain
had not ceased falling for the last week, the line
was probably damaged in several places and that
there was little chance of my reaching my des-
tination.

I got off with a good fright. I reached San Jose
safe and sound ; and I must add, before I go any
farther, that everyone there was astonished at
the wonderful good luck with which my little
trip had been attended.

I have never seen the Island of Ceylon, which
people say is the most beautiful spot on earth,

126

Costa Rica

but I question whether it can beat the splendid
panorama through which the railway to San
Jose runs. The forest which I had traversed
the previous evening was but a miserable coppice
in comparison. The railway first runs along the
coast between avenues of majestic palm trees
such as one finds in no botanical garden. There
I saw every tropical tree under the sun — I won't
weary you by telling you all their names, there
are two thousand two hundred varieties — trees
with colossal trunks from whose huge branches,
rising nearly a hundred feet into the air, hung
creepers like flaky, silvery pennants, called here
barba de viejo (old man's beard). Words are
powerless to describe the wonder and beauty
of those green grottoes hung with vegetable
stalactites. This magnificent forest is apparently
limitless. It carpets the valleys, clothes the
mountains in every tint of green, varied here
and there with a red or yellow note, by a cluster
of flowering trees, and fades away into the pale
blue distance. We were in the rainy season.
A thin veil of sparkling mist softened and blended
the colours, which otherwise might have seemed
too gorgeous, of that sheet of emerald water.

127

The Fair Land of Central America

This damp veil was sometimes lighted up by
the unexpected vision of some startled ruby or
topaz-coloured bird like a diamond flashing in
the sun. What splendid scenery for a play ! . . .
but, alas ! stage scenery is only paint and canvas.
The real forest knows naught of the comedy and
tragedy of life. That forest whispered in the
breeze and basked in the sunshine as ignorant
of the narrow railway winding through its glades
as of the boa-constrictor which creeps and slinks
through the grass at its feet.

Talking of birds, if one could find any spot
on earth where one could establish that feathered
republic of which so many poets, from Aristo-
phanes to Edmond Rostand, have dreamed,
Costa Rica would surely be the very spot. This
tiny State shelters seven hundred different species
of birds, double the number found in the whole
of Europe. The largest of all is the white eagle.
I must confess that I only saw one specimen,
and that was in the museum at San Jose ! But
it looked so ferocious that, although it was dead
and stuffed, it made me feel quite uncomfortable.
The smallest is the humming-bird, no bigger
than half a butterfly's wing. The most beautiful

128

Costa Rica

is the quetzal, a green bird with a scarlet breast,
which a neighbouring republic, Guatemala, has
adopted as her emblem because it can only live
at liberty and dies as soon as it is imprisoned in a
cage.

You will notice that I have said nothing
about orchids although they are very plentiful
out there, and were then in full bloom. It is
because the orchid, the blossom of a parasite
growing on the topmost branches of certain trees,
makes no show. One scarcely notices it. This
floral jewel, the most beautiful work of art ever
made by the Hands of the Celestial Jeweller,
seems formed to adorn the breast of some pretty
woman at a ball.

All the lower region of Costa Rica is unin-
habited. This terrestrial paradise still shelters
one hundred and thirty different species of snakes,
but Adam and Eve have fled. I must confess
that it is very unhealthy. When the Catholic
Church can make up her mind to adopt modern
ideas, which she is bound to do in spite of Pius X,
and when we allow the Bible to walk hand in
hand with science, we shall no longer see a cheru-
bim armed with a flaming sword standing at the
i 129

The Fair Land of Central America

gate of Eden : a malarial-fever mosquito will
have taken his place.

However, now that the United States buy
nearly all their bananas of Costa Rica — to such
an extent that a company of fruit-boats has
lately been started in order to supply them
with one million regimes a month ! — the American
planters have brought negroes from Jamaica,
and have built all along the railway track rows
of little iron houses, from which those great,
simple-minded niggers grin and laugh as they
watch the train pass by. These shanties are
already half hidden in the tall, rank grass and
drowned beneath the overarching palm trees.
Green parrots hang from the creepers and screech
and chatter as if they were mocking us.

The passing train summons whole swarms of fat
little naked niggers ; they paddle about in the
warm rain, put out their tongues at us and pelt
us with banana skins, while their mothers carry
on their heads baskets of bananas which they ask
us to buy with a broad grin.

When the train leaves these lovely plains and
begins to climb up towards the mountainous
region where the capital is situated, the scenery

130

COSTA RICA: TYPICAL BANANA FARM
Reproduced by permission of the Rev. Bishop Ormsby, Paris

THE MAI1VK OFF HAVANA

Costa Rica

changes, and one might almost fancy oneself in
the Engadine or in the Caucasus. It is still
very beautiful, although more familiar to the
eye of the European. The track crosses mountain
torrents and precipices on tremendously high
bridges. The bananas and negroes disappear
and give place to Indians and coffee plantations.
Little by little all the beauty fades away from
the scenery. The vegetation grows thinner.
Great, depressing reaches of stony tracts alternate
with prairies, but they are no longer the lovely,
smiling prairies of the lowlands. It hardly seemed
worth while to take a three weeks' sea-voyage
only to see scenery which reminded me of arid
districts in Brittany or the Ardennes. Alas !
the sky grew greyer and greyer. The horizon
was now bounded by rocky peaks, and all my
illusions lay dead and buried in a stone coffin under
a leaden sky. I thought of all my most gloomy
souvenirs of Norway.

The capital of Costa Rica is a fraud. Its
magnificent railroad ends in a village hidden in
the mountains and inhabited by twenty-five
thousand peasants. Such was San Jose. What
would-be wag told me that the houses were

The Fair Land of Central America

covered with roses ? No doubt the roses were
hidden by the houses, which are all alike, low,
and no better than artisans' dwellings. The hotel
was badly kept.

If San Jose is the most beautiful capital in
Central America, what can the others be like ?
And how can these pygmy cities hope to with-
stand gigantic New York and Chicago ?

Nothing is more deceptive than one's first
impressions of a new town : they are seldom true ;
and after a sojourn, one usually goes away with
quite another opinion. One can tell what the
houses are like at a glance ; one needs more
time to see what the inhabitants are like. Now
the latter, unless one happens to be an architect,
alone interest the general public. The capital
of Costa Rica impresses one unfavourably at
first sight. The new-comer stands looking over
the balcony of the wretched inn which has the
impudence to call itself " The Palace Hotel/'
watches the toy tramway whose trolley is con-
siderably taller than the dolls' houses, and im-
mediately feels an intense desire to decamp !

But when I awoke next morning and saw

132

SAN JOSE: MAIN STREET. MILK-CARRIERS AND OX-CART

COSTA RICA: THE FOREST OF PERALTA
Both reproduced by permission of the Rev. Bishop Ormsby, Paris

Costa Rica

the magnificent sun of the tropics, when I went
to pay calls with letters of introduction which
immediately procured me the friendship of several
distinguished families, when I learned to ap-
preciate the sweet, sunny disposition of the male
portion of the population and the strange charm
ot the female citizens of the capital of Costa
Rica, the exquisite climate, the charming pic-
turesqueness of streets with a background of blue
mountains, and the rare beauty of that hour
when the clouds roll up from the Atlantic and
from the Pacific, gather round the Cordilleras
and form a canopy of unspeakable glory, like
an apotheosis of flowers and flames, above the
setting sun — ah ! then I began to change my
opinion completely. At the end of three days I
felt as if I could spend the rest of my life quite
happily out there.

It is quite true that the town is vulgar-looking
and almost ugly. They told a fib when they
said that the houses were covered with roses ;
but one might truly say that the young girls
out there are like roses, white, yellow and red
roses.

The women whom one meets in the streets

The Fair Land of Central America

always look as if they were going to, or coming
back from a ball. At nine o'clock in the morning,
in mud and rain, you will never see them except
in satin shoes and white muslin furbelows. A
long pale pink or pale green shawl covers their
shoulders ; a bright scarlet flower is usually
stuck into the thick braids of black hair. Thus
decked out, they walk up and down the streets
of the capital with their arched eyebrows, their
bright eyes and their faces more covered with
rouge and powder than any lorette at the Folies-
Bergere.

Their profession is much the same": they
are both man-hunters. But let me explain
that the Costa-Ricienne is husband-hunting. There
are four girls to every boy in Costa Rica, so the
sons are much petted. They are obliged to be
careful of themselves and to look out for the
traps which the weaker sex is always laying
for them. As for the girls, their one idea is to
get some young man into such a tight corner
that he cannot get out of it ! Papa and mama
then appear upon the scene and force the author
of the scandal to pick up the pieces.

I was invited to assist at a marriage which had

Costa Rica

been " arranged " after that manner. The neces-
sary scandal had occurred during a picnic. At
a certain moment the young lady lingered behind
the party of guests on horseback and summoned
her novio to her aid ; her horse's girth was loose
and her saddle was slipping ! The young lover
was obliged to seize the damsel round the waist
in order to get her off her horse. But the girTs
brother was on the look out ; he galloped up
in a fearful fury and found the young couple
entwined in each other's arms. Whereupon an
awful scene took place. The women shrieked
and the men shook their fists in one another's
faces ! The girl's brother challenged the gay
Lothario to fight a duel. As in all fairy stories,
it ended with a marriage.

Please to observe that the bold minxes who
invent these artful and complicated dodges are
usually only thirteen years of age. Necessity
is the mother of invention.

As to the aforesaid marriage, it was celebrated
in the usual Costa Rican fashion ; nobody went
to church ; the priest came to the bride's house
and blessed the young couple in the drawing-
room at midnight in the presence of the family

The Fair Land of Central America

and their guests. The happy pair solemnly
exchanged ten coins, and then everybody began
to dance under garlands of flowers and many-
coloured Chinese lanterns. And their two lives
were united — for a week !

For the honeymoon seldom lasts longer than
a week. Spaniards are charming lovers but very
unsatisfactory husbands. With the exception
of Costa Rica, where the morals of the clergy
are very strict, the padres of the other republics
usually have a family to bring up — which they
do most conscientiously. I was told of an ex-
tremely rich padre who gave his seven daughters
splendid dowries, and who lived like a patriarch
of old days and was universally respected. The
clergy have a right to demand the firstfruits
of stall and granary. There is a proverb in
Spanish-America which says that there are only
two professions in which a man can live com-
fortably— as president of the republic or as
priest !

One would think that, with such morals, the
laws would be very unjust towards women-
folk. Not a bit of it ! Nowhere in Europe will
you find women better off. The married woman

136

Costa Rica

has entire control over her own fortune. If she
earns her daily bread, her husband has no right
to her wages.

Travellers in those new countries are always
being astonished by something or the other ;
a hundred years ago those morals would have
been condemned by Europe as corrupt, and
yet they possess certain laws which will probably
not be passed for another hundred years in
Europe.

Which are best — good laws or good morals ?
One can but do one's best : if you don't possess
very high principles, it is just as well to have
good laws !

Why is war always breaking out in Central
America ? It is partly the fault of the race
and partly the fault of its geographical position.

The Spanish-American race is a quarrelsome
race ; fiery blood ran in the veins of its ancestors,
the old Conquistadors and the Indians. The
geographical position of Central America has
much to answer for ; the five little provinces,
under Spanish rule, constituted a dependency
of the Spanish crown and were called Guatemala.

The Fair Land of Central America

Nowadays each province hopes, by trampling
on its four neighbours, to be able to reconstruct
the great isthmian State to its own advantage.
As soon as one state thinks itself stronger than
its neighbours, it begins to plot and plan, hoping
thereby to force the weaker states to accept the
dictator of its choice. That is why war is always
breaking out in Central America.

When things are very bad they usually take
a turn for the better. Costa Rica, the smallest
but the most sensible of the republics, suggested
to her touchy sister-republics that they should
call a sort of family council.

Their two powerful neighbours in the north,
Mexico and the United States, both had very
good but very different reasons for wishing peace
to be maintained in the isthmus : the United
States wanted to be able to complete their con-
quest undisturbed, while Mexico wanted to de-
prive the United States of any excuse for an
armed occupation.

They both agreed that such an institution
would be a very good thing, and each sent an
ambassador to act as godfather to the infant
council at its christening.

138

Costa Rica

The two godpapas, together with five delegates
from the central republics, arrived in a modest
third-class cruiser belonging to the Yankee navy,
which, however, the local newspapers styled
una nave gigantesca !

San Jose" gave the messengers of peace a very
charming reception. Instead of mobilizing the
army of Costa Rica — it is true that it only num-
bers five hundred men — five thousand school-
children were drawn up in line under charge of
their school-ma'ams. The little boys were very
neatly dressed ; they each carried a small flag.
The little girls, each holding a nosegay, looked
charming and were better dressed than many
country children in France. As for the school-
ma'ams, they were natives of San Jose, and that
town is celebrated for its beautiful senoritas.

The magistrates of the Supreme Court arrived
in the smartest of landaus. The only fault
one could find was that the coats of arms painted
on the carriage doors were rather too large.
But that is the fault of the arms of Costa Rica,
which represent several mountains, a seascape,
a three-master, and a setting sun.

Several carriages full of French officers followed

i39

The Fair Land of Central America

at a brisk trot. I saw colonels of artillery regi-
ments, captains of light infantry, troops of the
line, and even the plume worn by our military
cadets at Saint-Cyr. I was much astonished.
But these uniforms were only a pretty compli-
ment paid by the officers of Costa Rica to our
naval outfitters.

As these uniforms are made of thin material,
and as they have not seen much service as yet —
Costa Rica has been at peace with her neighbours
for twenty-five years, which the local newspapers
call immemonale — they are very becoming to
their wearers.

The greatest day of all was the day of the
solemn inauguration, when the American am-
bassador announced that Mr. Carnegie, the mil-
lionaire-philanthropist, had given him a cheque
for five hundred thousand francs, in order to
build a temple worthy of him at this first tribunal
of arbitration.

Alas ! the new court will find that the difficulty
lies, not in passing sentences, but in executing
them.

I cannot imagine General Zelaya, who has
been President of Nicaragua for the last fourteen

140

Costa Rica

years — although the constitution of Nicaragua
declares that the president can only be elected
for four years and that he is not re-eligible —
I cannot imagine M. Estrada Cabrera, President
of Guatemala, who is quite as fond of having his
own way, obeying any decisions of the Supreme
Court which do not happen to suit their own
ideas. They will cause endless delay, recall
their delegate under some futile pretext and
then play 'possum.

Will the United States assume the role of
sheriff's officer, of bailiff, and will they inter-
pose by force of arms ? That would only hasten
what they are trying to prevent.

I will now tell my readers a few anecdotes
concerning the despots of Central America.

As soon as the president of one of those little
republics, which are less populous than many
a big European town, has reduced to obedience
or banished into exile the handful of energetic
men who alone are capable of opposing his arbi-
trary designs, he only has to reckon with timid
and isolated Creoles or with still savage and
ignorant Indians. He is then free to do what-
ever he likes, either for good or for evil. Be he

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The Fair Land of Central America

good or bad, liberal-minded or arbitrary, he need
fear no rival, except that rival happens to be
stronger than he. Until that rival appear, on
the scene, he will be absolutely all-powerful ;
he need respect nobody and nothing, neither
the property nor the liberty of foreigners, as
Castro proved in Venezuela when he despoiled
and banished American, English and French
subjects.

And Castro is not the only person who snaps
his fingers at diplomatists and squadrons ! It
is only two years ago that General Zelaya, the
President of Nicaragua, incarcerated some North
Americans, and when the United States' consul
protested, retorted by banishing him ignomini-
ously from the territory of the republic without
more ado. The United States swallowed the
insult without a murmur and appointed another
consul. They could not declare war against tiny
Nicaragua. No one takes a sword to kill a flea !

General Zelaya, however, is rather an original
individual. I will not speak of his obstinacy
in keeping the power in his own hands, notwith-
standing the Constitution. Neither will I mention
his enormous fortune, estimated at fifty millions,

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Costa Rica

although Paul de Kock's honest work-girls, " who
were able to buy themselves diamonds out of
their savings/* are quite put in the shade by
this orderly fellow who has managed to save
fifty millions from a salary of one hundred thou-
sand francs.

But that is quite an ordinary occurrence in
America ! No one is astonished at the fact
that the widow of Barrios, a poor half-bred
Indian who died President of Guatemala, should
enjoy a dower of fifteen million dollars. Even
in Costa Rica, which, however, is a model re-
public and well known for its honesty in con-
stitutional and official matters, I was shown
a young sub-lieutenant who on his majority
had inherited seven and a half millions.

" His father made this fortune," they told me.
" Oh ! indeed/' said I. " Was he in business ? "
" No, he was President of the Republic/'
So Senor Zelaya, President of Nicaragua,
with his fourteen years' dictatorship and his
fifty millions of savings, is just like all past,
present, and future presidents, except that he
has one or two picturesque ideas about governing
peculiar to himself.

The Fair Land of Central America

Whenever a revolution breaks out in Nicaragua,
that is to say about every other year, he makes
the rich citizens pay a " voluntary tax." If
the said rich citizens don't seem particularly
anxious to support the good cause, he has them
imprisoned, or starved at home, or hung up by
the thumbs, all time-honoured customs in America.
But to General Zelaya belongs the honour of
having invented a novel and agreeable punish-
ment. When in 1900 several proprietors in
Nicaragua, having been condemned to pay
" voluntary taxes " varying from one to two
hundred thousand francs, turned obstinate, he
had them all brought to the barracks, where
soldiers in his presence administered to the un-
fortunate men douches of iced water, salt and
red pimento — " in order to wake them up a bit/'
he declared in his usual sweet, well-modulated
voice. For the general was educated in France,
at Versailles, and he prides himself upon his
exquisitely polished manners, never raises his
voice, and only uses very refined expressions.

That, however, is a characteristic common
to all those little American despots. They are
usually well educated and capital talkers. You

144

Costa Rica

return from your first interview delighted and
sanguine. You soon change your tone. And
yet they are not monsters. They are only cruel
when they think it absolutely necessary to be
so, and they hardly ever murder anyone except
he happens to be their declared enemy. They
are very gallant and think that persuasion is
better than force. This, in fact, is the emblem
of all these despots, from Castro, the master of
Venezuela, to Estrada Cabrera, lord of Guatemala.
The latter, however, only just lately had a num-
ber of persons, including several ladies moving
in the highest circles, executed ; they had been
plotting against him, and had tried to assassinate
him. Then the tiger, who pretends to scratch,
loses his temper and bites.

An eyewitness described the scene to me :

Some pupils of the Polytechnic School — five,

say some ; seven, say others — tried to shoot

M. Estrada Cabrera just as he was leaving his

palace and passing in front of the troops on his

way to attend a diplomatic reception. The

attempt failed because the standard-bearer, who

was to give the signal to fire by lowering the flag

just as the President drove by, either from clumsi-

K 145

The Fair Land of Central America

ness or from emotion, lowered it so suddenly
that the President was forced to bend his head
in order to avoid it. As all the conspirators aimed
at his head, all the bullets passed above M.
Estrada Cabrera, whose hand was only slightly
grazed by a stray shot.

Official reports say that the President had
the culprits executed ; but they forget to add
that he had the Polytechnic School " deci-
mated/' l beginning with the colonel in command.
For some time the prisons had been full to over-
flowing with political prisoners. Immediately
after the attempt upon his life, M. Estrada
Cabrera sent an order that all these prisoners
were to be executed without being tried.

As the tyrant hates the sound of firearms,
the unfortunate men were stabbed to death.
About sixty of them were despatched like so
many oxen. The slaughter then extended to
the victims' wives, mothers, and sisters. . . . The
capital of Guatemala, a big town with eighty
thousand inhabitants, was terrorstruck.

Don't think that Senor Estrada Cabrera is a
monster! He is a delightful fellow to talk to,

1 Decimer \ to execute every tenth person.
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Costa Rica

and fascinates everyone who has anything to
do with him. Only people will try to kill him,
so he kills them. That is one of the charms of
despotism.

Guatemala has had worse taskmasters. Rafael
Carreras did not know how to read, but he ruled
her with a rod of iron for thirty years. When
a diplomatist from a foreign country handed
him a written note, he used to take it and look
at it upside-down with the greatest gravity.

But Ruffino Barrios was the worst of all the
despots of Guatemala. Ruffino Barrios will ever
remain the prototype of the American dictator ;
he was not only extraordinarily brave and as
ambitious as Napoleon, but he was also brutal
and hot-tempered. He had a very unpleasant
knack of playing practical jokes. He used to
have his enemies' wives placed in hammocks ;
a bull, which had been purposely trained to gore
and butt at these hammocks, was then let loose
to torture these unfortunate creatures.

One evening the terrible President, while riding
through his dominions, entered the village of
a Spanish priest named Pages. Despot and
priest supped together. Barrios thought he

The Fair Land of Central America

would like to amuse himself by shocking his
host, so he began to blaspheme the Virgin and
all the saints in paradise. The priest got angry.
The despot, who always carried a riding-whip
in his hand, gave his host a cut across the face
with it. But the priest was hot-tempered, too.
He sprang at Barrios' throat, threw him on the
ground and was just going to throttle him when
a soldier, attracted by the noise of china breaking,
rushed up, shot the priest in the back and
killed him. The soldier was given the rank
of general.

Barrios had a cupboard in his house in which he
kept his entire fortune. When he opened this
cupboard, one saw three or four loaded revolvers
lying upon piles of bank-notes. However, the
pistols did not prevent him dying, like Father
Pages, from a bullet in his back. He was com-
manding a body of troops during a great battle
against the neighbouring Republic of San Salvador,
when he was killed by a bullet which did not come
from the enemies' ranks. One cannot help feeling
a certain amount of admiration for those fellows
who, after all, are not responsible for a state of
social anarchy which existed before they were

148

Costa Rica

born, who try to play the part of the lion among
the wolves, who lay their royal paws on every-
thing they can reach, who hold the entire pack
of wild beasts at bay for twenty or thirty years,
and then, like a worn-out king of the forest,
covered with glory and weary of fighting, end by
dragging their prey into some dark corner and
there devouring it.

Only Latin America cannot expect that these
old-fashioned, petty tyrants will be able to help
her throw off the United States' formidable
commercial yoke.

Such are my reasons for thinking that the
new Central American court of arbitration will
not prove a success.

But at least it will have done the inhabitants
of Costa Rica one good turn : it will have enabled
them to use their theatre !

This theatre has been the cause of much pride
and much grief to them ; they are proud of it
because it cost them ten millions, and they are
grieved because they cannot use it for lack of
actors.

This magnificent Carrara marble building,

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The Fair Land of Central America

adorned with valuable carvings, gilding and rich
velvet, is almost too beautiful for a town whose
streets are unpaved and whose water supply
and sanitary arrangements leave much to be
desired. It seems a pity that such a beautiful
theatre should never be used. San Jose is not
exactly on the high road to the rest of the world,
and the last theatrical performance took place
eighteen months ago !

So they were delighted to be able to seize this
opportunity in order to give a big ball, which
was indeed a very smart affair. One might have
thought oneself in Paris, and yet San Jose is only
a small place with twenty-five thousand inhabi-
tants ; but what people they are ! It must be a
question of altitude. Water boils below one hun-
dred degrees on the summit of Mont Blanc !

The ladies of Costa Rica, whose original cos-
tume I had already had occasion to admire in the
streets, were dressed in the latest Paris fashions,
and looked radiantly beautiful. The Costa-Ri-
cienne's head is usually small and long, like that
of a statuette of Tanagra ; but the oval face,
slender nose, arched eyebrows, the brilliant black
pupils shaded by heavy eyelids, remind one of

150

Costa Rica

the Virgins of the Umbrian School, the serious,
refined Madonnas of Perugino.

These women are experts in the art of loving.
In the train which took me from San Jose to the
Atlantic coast, I met a handsome, distinguished-
looking couple belonging to one of the oldest
families in the country ; he was tall and slender,
with an aquiline nose and a strong face ; she was
delicate-looking and fair, which is very rare in
those parts. They got out at one of the inter-
mediate stations, where I was shown the towers
of their castle perched high up on the mountain ;
a beautiful place but terribly isolated. They
must be very fond of each other to live all alone
all the year round. And that is just what they are.
Someone told me all about their romantic
marriage.

It seems that she had loved him ever since they
were children together. He was wealthy and lived
the life of a fashionable young man about town,
and was in no hurry to settle down. A certain
millionaire from Honduras appeared upon the
scene and fell in love with the young lady. She
refused his offer at first, as she had already refused
all other offers ; but her parents insisted, told her

151

The Fair Land of Central America

that she was wasting her youth, that the ungrate-
ful swain did not care a straw about her, etc.
etc. At last she consented to marry him. The
evening of the wedding came ; as I have already
mentioned, people always marry at midnight in
Costa Rica. The whole town had been invited.
The bride alone was missing. Her disgusted re-
lations had to confess that she had refused to
leave her room and to beg their guests to excuse
her conduct. One can easily imagine with what
feelings the guests retired. Another surprise was
in store for them on the morrow, for they were
informed that the bride was going to marry
another man, the man whom she had always
loved !

This is what had happened ; just at the last
minute the bride received a bouquet of flowers
from the thankless object of her affections. In
the bouquet was a note containing these
words :

11 If you still love me, don't marry that chap
from Honduras. I am willing to marry you."

On reading these words the poor girl fainted.
There was an awful family row that night, for the
bride's brothers found the unlucky note ; they

152

Costa Rica

had great difficulty in making their sister tell
them the writer's name. At last she told them,
and they, burning to avenge their honour — for
they still thought that they had been hoaxed —
rushed off to the young man's house. They found
him slumbering peacefully.

" Senores ! " said he. "I wrote it and I mean
it. If your sister will consent, I shall esteem it
an honour to marry her to-morrow ! "

The ceremony took place on the morrow ; the
whole town, which had calculated upon one duel
at least with the rejected lover, was terribly
scandalized. But he contented himself with
remarking :

" Had I married her, there would have been
three unhappy people in the world. It is better
that there should only be one."

These words showed that the millionaire from
Honduras deserved to be loved, if love, alas !
were a question of deserts.

I spent one month in Panama and one month
in Costa Rica. I conversed with politicians from
Nicaragua, Honduras, San Salvador, and Guate-
mala, so I think I am now in a position to reply

The Fair Land of Central America

to the threefold question which I asked myself
on landing in Central America : Will the United
States take possession of those countries ? How
long will it take them to do so ? What effect
will this conquest have upon Europe ?

Yes, the United States intend to conquer the
whole of the American isthmus, from the Isthmus
of Tehuantepec to the Isthmus of Darien, and the
conquest will be not only a commercial conquest
— everyone agrees upon that point — but it will
also be a political conquest. In the case of Panama
it has already become an accomplished fact.
As to Costa Rica, where the Yankees already
own the flat banana-producing lands, it will take
them about five years to buy, piece by piece,
the high plateaux where coffee is cultivated ;
and then Costa Rica will be devoured like Panama.
The Yankees will then attack the next republic.
If they take five years to conquer each republic,
the Stars and Stripes, at the end of another
twenty-five years, will have added five more
stars to their constellation ; they will then float
from the snowy lakes of Canada to the tropical
forests of Colombia. Will they pass over Mexico,
or will she, too, be included ? I will answer that

Costa Rica

question in my chapter upon Mexico. Let us first
finish with Central America.

Costa Rica is the most peaceable, the most
enlightened, and therefore the most powerful
of the five republics. Everyone agrees that she
is a good century ahead of her neighbours. When
Costa Rica is at the mercy of the Yankee, the
others will soon go under. Now Costa Rica is
already undermined.

What is a country ? It is a huge business-
house. Costa Rica sells bananas and coffee.
When we see a Yankee instead of a Costa Rican
in every plantation, that is to say behind every
counter, we shall be obliged to admit that the
business belongs to America. The United States
declare that they have no political ambitions ;
they promise to make no changes in the firm of
the old trading-house, which, in future, will be
worked with their capital and for their benefit,
and will continue to be called the " Republic of
Costa Rica." That may be. It is being done on
the banks of the Thames, where many businesses
belonging to old English firms are now being run
by German capitalists. But what is done in
England, the best governed country on the face

155

The Fair Land of Central America

of the globe, cannot be done in Spanish-America,
in the most ungovernable countries on earth.
Whether they like it or not, the United States will
be obliged to take the reins of the five chariots
which bear their fortunes into their own hands.
The five native charioteers cost too much to keep
and quarrel too much among themselves.

The commercial conquest of Costa Rica will be
accomplished in two moves ; the first has already
been made, the second is going to be made. The
unhealthy and almost impassable forests on the
Atlantic coast were, so to speak, neglected.
The Yankees purchased them for a mere song.
They have bought the railway, imported negroes
from Jamaica, established a direct service of
fruit boats between Costa Rica and New Orleans,
and the banana trade has now become a most
flourishing affair. They are now going to tackle
the plateaux where coffee is cultivated.

However, these plateaux, unlike the forests,
are not neglected. Land is worth its weight in
gold up there. But the chief landowners' one
desire is to sell their estates and to go and live on
their income in Europe.

The fact is that country life in Costa Rica is

156

Costa Rica

rather unpleasant. All the servants are lazy,
incompetent, insolent and dishonest. They
neither know, nor do they wish to learn, what to
do. They give notice if you make the slightest
remark ; I might almost say that they only
stay in your house just long enough to find some-
thing, a jewel, plate, or linen, worth stealing.
Having made their haul, they decamp. Though
you may catch them in the very act, they always
get off scot-free, for their master knows by ex-
perience how lenient the judges are, and spares
himself the trouble of calling for the lazy and in-
competent policemen, who are very often the
thief's accomplices.

The master does not always discharge his ser-
vant after he has been caught stealing. Theft is
looked upon as a peccadillo, and people shut their
eyes to it. In the best hotel at San Jose the
chamber-maid stole my sleeve-links, a watch
belonging to an Italian tourist, and a French
lady's silk stockings. She was known to be a
thief. She was caught in the very act two years
ago. And yet the hotel proprietor still keeps her.
He locks up all his own possessions ; his guests
can look out for themselves !

The Fair Land of Central America

I was invited to stay in a pretty country-house
at the foot of the famous volcano of Irazu. On
the day of my arrival my purse, which I had left
on a table in the drawing-room, disappeared.
It was found in the maid-servant's trunk ; she
was but a child still and she confessed, with many
tears, that she had acted at the instigation of
the cook and the stable-boy, with whom she was to
share the stolen money. The three culprits were
dismissed, and other servants, who were probably
no better, were engaged.

On Sunday the Indians get drunk and beat one
another with their machete, a sort of sabre with
which they cut their way through the virgin
forests. The black workman is more sober, but
quite as lazy and more revengeful. If he is dis-
missed, woe betide the landlord or overseer who
tarries late at night at the entrance to a lonely
wood ! He will be found next morning with a
bullet in his brain. The Indian steals, the negro
murders.

That is why the rich landowners of Costa Rica
only ask to be able to convert their coffee planta-
tions, their fields of maize, and their pasture
lands into good, hard cash, which, in those young

158

Costa Rica

countries, can be invested at ten and twelve per
cent. That is why the Costa Rican, at the mercy
of his dishonest servants, threatened with death
by his black workmen, has only one wish : to
live in Paris with an income of one hundred
thousand francs. The Yankee who wants " to
trade " has only to knock at the door : he will
find it already open.

When once the Americans have got three-
quarters of Costa Rica into their clutches — not
including the fourth part, which belongs to the
native peasantry — they will want to reorganize
her finances and her police department. When
one is at home, one wants to be master in one's
own house. And so the name of Central America
will disappear from the face of the globe.

The present President of the Republic, Senor
Don Gonzales Viquez, to whom I expressed this
opinion quite openly, did not agree with me.

" Take Costa Rica ? Take Central America ?
But that is impossible. Europe would interfere !
Europe would prevent that ! "

How ? — that my honest friend Don Gonzales
Viquez forgot to tell me. England and France
both declare that they take no interest in that part

The Fair Land of Central America

of the world. Germany alone seems to display any
interest in the fate of Central America. But I
cannot imagine the Kaiser declaring war against
Uncle Sam in order to protect the petty tyrants
of Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Co.

Of course this annexation will be fatal to Euro-
pean interests. During the four years that the
Americans have owned the Panama Canal, they
have slowly but surely eliminated everything
and everybody, capital and employe, not " made
in America." It will be the same thing wherever
they go ; the European will only have to pack up
his traps and clear out. But what can be done
to prevent this event ?

I was told to console myself by the thought that
it would be a good thing for the European tourist !
He will be able to go and see Costa Rica, which is
one of the most beautiful countries in the world,
and Guatemala, which is no less beautiful, and
enjoy all the comforts and improvements which
the Yankee introduces wherever he goes. San
Jose is going to build a magnificent modern hotel
next year ; it will be run on American lines.
So in future we shall not be condemned to endure
the abominable dirt of the one hotel which at

1 60

Costa Rica

present is adorned with the high-flown name of
the Palace Hotel.

That is quite true. However, it is poor consola-
tion to the former owner of a palace to be invited
by the new proprietor to visit it in comfort. Europe,
had she wished it, might be cock of the walk in
Central America. The inhabitants invited us.
France preferred to go to Morocco, Germany to
Turkey, England to the Transvaal, Belgium to
the Congo. Perhaps they were wrong.

With a little method, a little more morality in
public and private affairs — the presence of Euro-
pean colonists would soon have brought this
about — these fertile and enchanting countries
would have become a paradise for the white race.
The Yankee is going to prove the truth of this
statement.

161

JAMAICA AND. CUBA

The President's train has to make way for a banana train — The
earthquake of January 14, 1907 — Tourists burnt alive —
Corpses sprinkled with petroleum — The banana's misdeeds —
Another paradise guarded by mosquitoes — The land of the
cigar — Good-bye to mermaids and sharks — The Cubans were
once dirty but handsome — The Tobacco Trust — Spanish
pride — The Cuban lives for love — Caged doves — The colour
problem — Witchcraft — The history of Mr. Seneca, corre-
spondent of the Temps newspaper — Business and sentiment —
Spain has too many children — After the iron yoke, the silver
bit — An intellectual desert — An unknown work by Victor
Hugo — A skull used as a champagne glass — Suicide among
poets.

IN order to realize what fate the United States
are holding in store for Central America when
she belongs to them, one need only to go to Cuba,
where the Yankee conquest is already bearing
sweet and bitter fruit.

It is easy to say that it is a simple matter to
go to Cuba. In reality no journey is easy in that
part of the world. In order to get to Cuba I
had to change my train twice and the boat twice ;

162

JAMAICA: STREET SCENE IN PORT-ROYAL
Reproduced by permission of York & Sons, Netting Hill

COSTA RICA: SAN JOSE. HANDLING COFFEE

J **nrnr1m'»f»H Kv nprmiccirm r*f frh#» "R ^v. Ri«hr»n Orm^Hv Pari

Jamaica and Cuba

and what trains and what boats they were !
The railroad in Costa Rica had been damaged by
the rains. The train stopped in the midst of the
forest during a perfect deluge of rain ; I had to
get out of the car and carry myself and my
baggage over a huge quagmire.

The United States have bought the railway of
Costa Rica ; they use it for the banana trade.
Passenger trains are only allowed to pass on
sufferance. A traffic manager last year had the
impudence to shunt the President of the Republic's
train on to a siding in order to let a banana train
pass ! The President sent in a protest. The inso-
lent manager was summoned back to New York.
But when presidents are treated with such scant
courtesy, you can imagine what the ordinary
passenger has to endure !

Our train was four hours late, and it was only
by a miracle that we caught the German boat
which started for Jamaica that very same evening.

These German boats, which ply between Central
America and the United States and which touch
at Costa Rica once a week, belong to the Ham-
burg-American Line and bear the names of the
Hohenzollern imperial family. The boat which I

163

The Fair Land of Central America

took was called the Prinz August Wilhelm. There
was a good deal both to praise and to blame
about it ; the cabins were luxurious, but the
food was abominable : the bread was musty and
the chickens burnt. And yet these boats are far
better than those on the American lines, the
Pacific Mail and the United Fruit, and so I did
well to choose a German line.

We took three days to reach Jamaica ; three
days and three nights — three nights on the
Caribbean Sea, such as one never forgets in after
life. Thunder rumbled frequently ; the hot air
was so charged with electricity that the heavens
were lit up every minute like a stage with footlights.
The effect only lasted a second. I had just time
to see the lightning flash, like myriads of golden
lizards, across this phosphorescent wall, and then
all became black again until another flash illu-
minated the fantastic architecture of the clouds.
At daybreak I saw a thunderbolt, like a red-hot
bullet, fall into the sea about a cable-length from
our steamer with a great splash which threw the
water high into the air.

On reaching Jamaica I beheld a scene of deso-
lation which touched me to the heart. The

164

PORT OF SPAIN, TRINIDAD

Reproduced by permission of York & Sons, Netting Hill

THE HOUSE OF THE FRENCH CONSUL, JAMAICA, RUINED BY THE
EARTHQUAKE OF HTH JANUARY, 1907

Jamaica and Cuba

island itself is a paradise of flowers and verdure,
but the memorable earthquake of January 14,
1907, reduced the town of Kingston to a heap of
ruins. Eighteen months later, the voices of eye-
witnesses of that catastrophe still trembled as they
related some of the most painful incidents. One
man had lost his whole fortune representing one
million francs. The mother of another had lain
dying for a fortnight in a stable which had been
converted into a hospital. Another had seen
hundreds of tourists imprisoned in the courtyard
of an hotel, out of which there was no escape,
and burning alive while they yelled with pain.

The town, which once boasted of its sixty-five
thousand inhabitants, burned for three whole
days. Cathedral, bank, theatre, everything was
burnt. And then they had to make great heaps
of the corpses in the squares and sprinkle them
with petroleum, so that those thousands of dead
bodies might not cause plague among the survi-
vors. Many negroes were caught stealing and
were shot on the spot.

The island itself, which is large — it contains
eight hundred thousand inhabitants — did not
suffer. It is all laid out in banana plantations ;

165

The Fair Land of Central America

and even when a banana field is beaten flat by a
cyclone, it springs up again in twelve months.

Jamaica used formerly to live by the sugar
trade ; but now it lives by bananas. Who, then,
eat these millions and millions of bananas ? The
Anglo-Saxon race. They all go to London, or
to New York. As the banana is easily cultivated
and extremely nourishing, it is destined to enjoy
a long reign of popularity. One can foresee the
day when it will become a successful rival to rice
and potatoes.

At the present day it assures prosperity to the
planters of Central America who cultivate it, but
it also does a good deal of harm. The Indians and
negroes have never been famed for industry ;
they are now reverting to their old wild, vagrant
habits. What is the good of working when one
need only stretch out one's hand towards the
bananas, which grow by the wayside, in order
to get as much as one can eat in a day ? There
are no labourers in the fields and no servants in
town. Will the age of the banana be the age of
universal laziness, and will that golden fruit
prove a curse ?

I have just said that this island is a paradise ;

1 66

Jamaica and Cuba

but nowhere on the face of this earth do we find
a perfect or a lasting paradise. Jamaica is only
pleasant as long as the winter lasts. Just at that
time it happened to be infested by mosquitoes :
huge, countless and particularly venomous mos-
quitoes. My face and hands were one mass of
sores at the end of twenty-four hours. My red,
swollen forehead was like a panorama of the Alps
at 'sunset. My hands had ceased to look like
hands : they were like two melons. I felt I must
fly ! What a pity ! The hotel was the first really
comfortable inn I had met with in America.
This hotel contained not only bathrooms but a
swimming-bath in the basement.

And so I had to take the boat to'Cuba, leave the
English island for the Spanish- American island !
Now Spanish inns are abominable places ; Yankee
hotels are clean, but the attendance is usually
bad. The English hotel realizes perfection.

However, as the traveller, like everyone else,
is obliged to consider his horse, which, in my case,
was represented by my body, I was obliged to
resist the temptations of this way-side inn ; so
I sailed for Cuba in order to see how the United
States treat their fallen foes.

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The Fair Land of Central America

That short sojourn in Jamaica revealed to me
another move in the Yankees* little game ; this
English possession in the West Indian Islands,
whose trade is nearly entirely monopolized by
New York, at present does not think of shaking
off John Bull's yoke, but when the latter sells her
to Cousin Jonathan, the produce of Jamaica will
be able to enter the United States duty free ;
that day the Jamaican planters will illuminate
their houses in honour of this happy event.

There are two themes upon which the tourist
is always harping : the tropical vegetation of
Cuba and the local colour of Havana. That is
because the greater number of these tourists
come straight from Europe or New York ; they
think that they are the first people to discover a
palm tree or a Creole wearing a mantilla. But
when you come via Costa Rica the impression
is quite different. In fact, the island of Cuba is
the least picturesque of all the West Indian islands.
Its trees have been cut down in order to make
room for the fields of sugar-cane and the tobacco
plantations. Everyone knows that wealth and
beauty do not always walk hand in hand. M. Paul

1 68

Jamaica and Cuba

Adam, who crossed the island on his way to the
exhibition of Saint Louis, wrote that he had seen
through the carriage window : " an exquisite
vision of beauty, like a peep into the garden of
Eden ! " Who was the Eve who made that Adam
think that the monotonous perspective of tobacco-
fields resembled the Garden of Eden ?

The only resemblance between Cuba and the
Garden of Eden is that the little children there run
about as naked as the angels in paradise.

As half the population is black, half these little
angels are chocolate-coloured. They are the
prettiest. The negro, whose face is so bestial
when he grows up, makes an adorable baby with
dimpled arms and fat little belly. For these tiny
gentlemen munch so much sugar-cane that their
inflated stomachs make them look like so many
black bees. The white child, with its flabby cheeks
and sickly look, does not compare favourably
with its brown brother. He looks as if the heavenly
Sculptor had made him out of the remains of the
lump of plaster from which his little brother had
been formed.

Havana is a big town containing three hundred
thousand inhabitants. For the last ten years

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The Fair Land of Central America

the Americans have been beautifying it and
making it more healthy ; but they have also made
it more commonplace. In another ten years it
will be no more interesting to visit than New
Orleans or San Francisco now are. The harbour
used to be full of sharks which fed upon the refuse.
The Americans constructed drains by which all
the refuse was carried far out into the sea, and so
these horrible, but picturesque, scavengers were
obliged to move on.

The Cubans used to be very dirty in their habits
but much admired for their personal beauty.
Now they are clean and no one thinks much of
their looks. Whole families no longer wash in the
same basin in water which was only changed
twice a week. The Yankee authorities have forced
them to construct certain necessary sanitary
conveniences and public baths, and to filter their
water. That is something. But the Cuban
senoras have left off wearing their gaily coloured
shawls and now wear muslin blouses ; their
caballeros have replaced the tight-fitting Anda-
lusian trousers by the hideous sloppy suit so dear
to the tailors of New York. From head to foot,
from his closely-shaved chin to his clumsy boots,

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Jamaica and Cuba

the Cuban tries, as much as his native elegance
and vivacity will allow him to do so, to copy the
thick-set, phlegmatic North American.

Cuba, like Panama, is a free republic, that is
to say she is only free in name. Owing to recent
disorders, she no longer owns a president of her
own choice, but a Yankee governor, who is an
arbitrary dictator. He has promised to retire
next year if the nation will consent to elect its
new president in an orderly fashion. But when
once the Yankee capitalist gets his claws in, he
takes good care to keep them there.

Cuba's riches, or to be more truthful, let us say
her only rich possession, is the tobacco trade
which employ's thirty thousand workmen and
represents an annual exportation of one hundred
and fifty millions. The American Trust has
monopolized nearly all the best-known brands,
from the Bock and the Henry Clay to the least
known. Three important brands, the Upmann,
Punch, and Romeo and Juliet, have alone been
able to keep their independence.

Sefior Manuel Lopez, the owner of the Punch
brand, returned to the managers of the Yankee
Trust their letter in which they asked him for

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The Fair Land of Central America

what sum he would consent to sell his manu-
factory, with this curt reply :

" All the gold in the United States would not
suffice to buy up Manuel Lopez ! " Bravo !

That was true Castilian pride in its best form.

Having learnt something by this rebuff, the
Trust sent a blank cheque to Mr. Upmann, with a
message to the effect that the owner of that
celebrated manufactory might fill in any sum he
liked. Mr. Upmann returned the blank cheque.

Most of the owners, who allowed themselves
to be tempted by gold, now regret their blind
folly. I know one manufacturer who goes every
day to the workshops of the Trust in order to
see that the cigars, which still bear his name on
their label, are made properly. They gave him two
and a half millions for his name ; but that name
he had made famous by his care and trouble in
manufacturing his cigars ; he does not intend that
his name shall be dishonoured by carelessness
and inferior materials. So he continues to work
for the honour of his name.

Nothing can take the place of the master's
eye ; cigar smokers — I do not smoke cigars, so
I am no judge — say that the celebrated brands

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Jamaica and Cuba

are no longer the same thing now that they are
made by a Trust. In old days competition and
amour-propre forced the small manufacturer to
choose the very best materials and to use the
greatest care in manufacturing his cigars ; now,
no matter how expert and how highly paid the
ordinary workman may be, he will never be able
to turn out an equally good article.

I wanted to inspect the workshops belonging
to the Trust. But I was told that the workmen
had been on strike for the last three weeks. It
seems that they demand a rise of ten per cent,
although their wages are quite high enough —
they vary between ten and thirty-five francs a day.

However, by some lucky chance which I
cannot account for, the independent manufac-
tories had not gone on strike. I found them hard
at work. I inspected one which employs one
thousand workmen at Havana, and four hundred
on its different plantations on the island. There
is an old proverb which says that nobody is worse
shod than the shoemaker's wife ; however, here
was an exception to the rule, for these cigar-
makers are great smokers and like to smoke the
very best brands. The manufactory calculates

The Fair Land of Central America

that its employes smoke from seven to eight
thousand of its best cigars daily ! Those eight
thousand cigars are put down as current expenses.

Tell me what you like best, and I will tell you
what you are.

When we know that the Russians' favourite
pastime is drinking, that the French prefer to
talk and the English to play rough games, we
know that the Russian is a dreamer, the French-
man a logician and the Englishman a fighter.
We must not imagine that, because Havana is
celebrated for its fine tobacco, the Cuban's
favourite occupation is smoking or rolling cigars
between his fingers. If he is always rolling them,
it is because he does so mechanically, without
thinking what he is about. His thoughts are
elsewhere. The Cuban only lives to love.

Doubtless the attraction of the sexes is a uni-
versal phenomenon ; ever since the birth of time
men and women have been attracted to one
another. However, most men, and not a few
women, manage to think of something else at
times. But it is not so with the Cubans.

The Havanese begins to fall in love at the early

Jamaica and Cuba

age of eleven years, and he continues in that
happy state until the day of his death. He chooses
a trade, a profession, because he must do some-
thing to earn his living, but he takes little or no
interest in it. And that is why he cares nothing
for art and literature. What is the good ? His
mind is busy with other things : he loves. Would
you have him take an interest in politics ? He
will do so sometimes in the hope of getting some
well-paid berth which requires but little work
on his part and which will enable him to surround
the object of his affections with luxury and
pleasures. If he travels it is only to go to Paris,
the paradise of the North and South American.
His love is unlike that of Dante for Beatrice.
The young Cuban does not pretend to be faithful,
and his love-making is conducted on very prosaic
lines. Some little mulatto girl usually gives him
his first lesson in the art. Then he flirts with his
cousins and friends, gets engaged, breaks off the
engagement, finally marries and, on the morrow,
goes off to make fresh conquests, and so on to the
end of the chapter. Like the butterfly, he dies
young. He tries to imitate the butterfly, with his
huge shirt collar and his patent leather shoes.

The Fair Land of Central America

If you could see him in the public swimming-bath,
you would be terrified by his thinness, his bent
back, narrow shoulders, and projecting ribs. It
is easy to tell how long it will be before he dies
of galloping consumption.

The best streets, that is to say the Prado, the
public promenade along the seashore, and the
celebrated Calle Obispo, are filled with groups
of five or six sneering, impudent-looking, clean-
shaven young fellows, tricked out in the sloppy
clothes beloved of their Yankee model. These
young men used to annoy ladies walking alone
in the streets. The American police, after having
vainly tried incarceration, at last found the only
remedy : they now fine the insolent fellows ten
dollars, and as Don Juan needs all his spare
cents to buy his neckties he now behaves himself.

For the Cubans are poor. The old Spanish
colony and the new American colony divide all
the island's riches between them. The Yankees
had to buy the celebrated cigar brands, which
they have now made into a Trust, from the
Spaniards. Whenever the Cuban gets a little
money he spends it in twenty-four hours on toilet
articles and other luxuries. They do not care

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Jamaica and Cuba

whether their homes are comfortable or not. I
saw several flats whose owners pay eleven thou-
sand francs a year for them ; the drawing-rooms
were splendid, but the dining-rooms and bedrooms
simply didn't exist ! They eat anyhow, at any time ;
they sleep on camp-beds put up in any stray corner.

The Cuban woman is not a good housekeeper ;
she, too, is always in love. When her brother
begins to strut about, she begins to divide her
day into two parts : she devotes the morning
to her toilet, or rather to long meditations in front
of her looking-glass ; unkind people say that she
does not spend much time in her bath, because
bathing is said to be injurious to the health. The
Cuban ladies gravely recommend their foreign
friends never to take a bath. All their washing
consists of dipping a rag into alcohol and smearing
it over their faces. When the family purse hap-
pens to be well filled, the alcohol is exchanged for a
Parisian perfume costing one hundred francs a
bottle.

At five o'clock, the Havanese, dressed in white

with a sky-blue or a scarlet ribbon in her hair,

according to whether her locks be fair or dark,

her velvety eyes shining beneath the blackened

M 177

The Fair Land of Central America

eyebrows and her lips well rouged, takes up a
position behind the high unglazed drawing-room
window, which is usually on a level with the street
and protected by bars. It is there that she spends
the whole evening, seated in her rocking-chair,
or standing behind the bars in order to purr and
coo to her lover on the pavement outside.

If you walk down any street in the fashionable
quarter between the Prado and the sea about
the hour of sunset, you will see the same scene
enacted over and over again. What do these
caged doves say to their would-be tamers ?
Childish things, foolish nothings, or else bitter
reproaches, jealous words which are the lover's
last shift all over the world. So the Cuban belles
spend the first years of their youth in flirting.
Strange to say, notwithstanding this bad begin-
ning, they make most excellent wives. Here, as
in Costa Rica, all foreigners who know anything
about the married lives of the natives, with one
accord declare that the women are a hundred
times better than the men. The Cuban woman
makes a splendid wife and mother, while the
husband, as a general rule, is not up to much.

Poor fellow ! Is it really all his fault ? His

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Jamaica and Cuba

temperament is against him ; the flowers are so
beautiful in those climes that he must be forgiven
if he loses his head at times ; like the butterfly,
he flits from one to another without being able
to recover his senses. I have already observed
in all Latin countries, and in Cuba in especial,
that if tropical America is destined to be swallowed
up by North America, if Spanish-American civili-
zation is bound to disappear on account of its
lack of higher education and commercial enter-
prise, we must throw the blame on the fascinating,
bewitching Creole women. The fair sex is too
fair out there ; she seems to stupefy her victims.
The Philistines from New York and Chicago can
come whenever they like ; they will find thou-
sands of Delilahs ready to welcome them !

Havana has already become quite a fashionable
town ; and it is destined to become still more
so. The Americans confess quite openly that they
intend to turn it into the Monte Carlo of the New
World. Three or four Palace Hotels have already
been built. The Prado is being covered with
vulgar but luxurious palaces, whose facades look
as if they were made of whipped cream. The
Vedado, the rich quarter reaching from one end

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The Fair Land of Central America

of the bay and connected with the Prado by a
wide promenade facing the ocean and winding
along outside white marble porticoed villas, took
four years to build.

Towards evening many carriages driven by
smart negro coachmen, in white liveries and grey
hats, come to parade up and down. The two
hundred automobiles of Havana rush along this
road ten or twelve times in an hour and give one
the impression that there must be at least two
thousand of them in Cuba. A cafe, a Grecian
temple and an old Spanish fortress try to draw
the tourist's attention from the spectacle of a
gorgeous sunset on the Caribbean Sea. In the port
a huge steamer with its three decks was starting
for New York ; as it steamed out of port it scraped
the stones of the jetty. A sailing-vessel from
Vera Cruz or New Orleans, flapping its white can-
vas wings, entered the port like a great bird,
weary of flying, returning to its nest. I saw many
mulatto women dressed in the latest Paris fashions
lolling among the cushions of their victorias.

I might have been in Europe except for the
coachmen's ebony faces and the mulatto women's
swarthy complexions. The Calle Obispo, Hava-

180

Jamaica and Cuba

na's Rue de la Paix, reminded me still more of
Europe. Nine out of ten shops pretend to be-
long to Frenchmen, sell Parisian toilets made in
Cologne and Lyons silk ribbons woven at Neu-
chatel. Both windows and shops are small.
The Yankee's beloved caravansaries have not
yet put in an appearance, but they will soon come.
A huge and hideous bank built of marble has
already been erected. Enormous advertisements
invite the passer-by to walk in and inspect the
safe, whose massive door — a sheet of steel weigh-
ing fourteen tons — cost (at least, so the adver-
tisement tells us) fifty thousand dollars. Surely
a bank with such a solid door must be a safe place
in which to invest one's money ? I examined the
wonderful safe ; the door was round and the
lock seemed as complicated as the inside of a
clock. Jules Verne, in his Voyage in the Moon,
describes a similar mechanism. Let us hope that
there will be no " moonshine " about this bank !
But a financier's honour is, in many respects,
similar to a woman's honour. It can be but a
poor thing if it has to depend on bolts and bars ;
and a quarter of a million francs is a heavy price
to pay for a lock.

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The Fair Land of Central America

The old Spanish town of former days, before
the advent of Paris fashions and New York bluff,
can only be seen in the shabby quarters such as
the Calle San Isidor or the little theatre of the
Actualidades.

The Calle San Isidor is the sailors' street, such
as one finds in all seaport towns. Here we see
dancing-saloons and drinking-shops galore. Most
of the women whom one meets in this quarter
are Spaniards ; but some of the haUtuees are black.

The popular little theatre of the Actualidades
is more picturesque. The most celebrated Anda-
lusian dancers do not disdain to appear on its
smoke-begrimed stage before a highly-coloured
audience. The Spanish patrician, such as Goya
painted her, with her thin, waxen-hued visage and
her great restless, feverish eyes, elbows the mer-
cury-coloured mulatto woman in the stalls which
are only separated from the herd of excited,
gesticulating negroes by a thin partition.

One evening I saw a dancer, as agile as a panther,
arrayed in a spangled dress, her face streaming
with perspiration and her fingers clutching her
castagnettes, writhe and twist above the foot-
lights. Two little bare-headed Spanish ladies,

182

Jamaica and Cuba

seated in the balcony — probably they, too, were
dancers — pelted her with roses, a perfect shower
of roses, which they had just bought of the
flower-girls! It seems that the ballerina had
surpassed herself that night, no doubt in honour
of the little comrades in the balcony, and the
audience, crazy with delight, yelled itself hoarse ;
those hundreds of harsh, guttural voices sounded
very much like a death-rattle.

The dancer in the spangled costume, a thin,
dark woman with rather too long a nose but
beautiful eyes, encouraged by this audience of
connoisseurs, skipped about the stage, reared
herself up like an Arab steed, writhed like a
snake, shook her black locks as if she were shaking
ashes from a torch, bent and swayed like a palm
tree, sank down like a tired wave on the sea-
shore, and finally took up her position in the
middle of the stage with nostrils dilated, head
thrown well back, and hands on hips, like a statue
of proud defiance.

All the men and women in that theatre were
pale and trembling with excitement ; they, too,
had danced that wild dance of desire and revolt.
And when she courtesied, breathless and ex-

183

The Fair Land of Central America

hausted, they all sank down into their seats with
a weary sigh.

Will this passionate nation really consent to
eat humble pie at the phlegmatic North American's
behest ? Alas ! has it not always expended its
energy over similar futilities and trifles ?

Mr. Taft, Mr. Roosevelt's successor at the
White House, not very long ago paid a visit
to Havana. With his hands behind his back,
his lighted cigar still between his fingers, he pro-
posed a toast which awakened fond hopes in the
breast of many a Cuban patriot. During the
course of his speech, he said :

" My friends, we don't want to annex you,
we want you to keep the government in your
own hands. So next year we are going to with-
draw our troops as we have already done on a
previous occasion. But remember ! If your
political squabbles lead to another outbreak of
civil war and if trade is imperilled in your country,
we shall return, and this time we shall never leave
you again ! "

The political men at Washington mean what
they say. In every country, home politics come

184

Jamaica and Cuba

before foreign politics. Before satisfying their
imperialist ambitions, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft
will take care not to alienate the votes of the
Southern States ; for the latter are dead against
an annexation which, they fear, would injure
their sugar and tobacco trade. But it is the same
all over the world : politicians propose and
financiers dispose. When once the redoubtable
cape of the presidential elections has been passed,
the Yankee business men who formed the Havana
Tobacco Trust, who built the Santiago railway,
who have bought all the best plots of ground on the
island, will force the United States to annex Cuba.

I must confess that the rich Cubans secretly
desire this annexation. Four years ago, during
the disorders which caused the Yankees to inter-
vene for the second time, Havana was very nearly
pillaged. The army of insurgents was about
to enter the capital, when the rebels' mothers
and sisters, imitating the conduct of the Roman
matrons towards Coriolanus, went and begged them
to delay their entry for a few hours, thus giving the
American soldiers time to arrive upon the scene.

This civil war lasted forty days and ruined the
credit of the Republic. In future the Cubans

185

The Fair Land of Central America

would be unable to count upon French and English
capital ; the island was completely at the mercy
of Yankee capitalists.

Both rich and poor in Havana detest the Ameri-
can occupation, because it humiliates them. They
feel the heavy hand of the master. When the
governor, Mr. Magoon, placed policemen at either
end of the street in which his palace is situated
and forbade anyone to pass under his windows
after dark, lest the noise of a carriage or cart
rumbling over the pavement should disturb his
slumbers, the haughty Cubans, forced to go out
of their way to please him, realized that they had
got a hard taskmaster. But the memory of that
day when Havana was nearly pillaged by bands
of crazy negroes led by a handful of ambitious
men, obliges them to champ their bits in silence.

The fear of the negro in those climes is the
beginning of wisdom. Cuba contains about two
million inhabitants, half of whom are black.
And the Cuban negroes, although they are no
longer slaves, are the most ignorant and unintelli-
gent in the whole of the West Indies. Many of
them seem as ignorant as their African ancestors,
whose witchcraft they continue to practise. One

1 86

Jamaica and Cuba

of the most horrible of these customs consists of
tearing out the heart of a white child and giving
it to some palsied old nigger that he may eat it
and become young again. There were two cases
of this horrible crime during the fortnight I spent
in Cuba. It is useless to torture the culprits by
strangling them with the garrot ; they [still keep
up this terrible custom.

Is the negro capable of being educated ? Yes,
certainly, but to what extent ? And will there be
no sudden relapses ? That learned man, Dr.
Montanet, professor of anthropology at the Uni-
versity of Cuba, told me of a typical case.

A black man from Hayti named Seneca was
sent, while still quite a youth, to France, where he
won first prizes for rhetoric and philosophy at
the general examinations organized in all Paris
lycees. The Temps newspaper, amazed at his
intelligence, immediately offered him a place on
its staff. So at eighteen years of age the black
Seneca became correspondent of the great French
newspaper.

However, Mr. Seneca soon asked to be allowed
to take a holiday ; he wanted to go and see his
old parents in the far-away West Indies.

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The Fair Land of Central America

The editors of the Temps, highly pleased with
his articles, gave him six months' leave, paid his
voyage and promised to continue to pay his
salary during his absence. The prodigy from
Hayti, in elegant attire, embarked. No one heard
anything more of him. At the end of his leave,
still no news. They wrote to him ; no reply. The
legation was asked to make inquiries : Mr. Seneca
had gone off no one knew where. At last, after
many months, a servant in the employ of the
French ambassador at Havana came to tell his
master that he had found the long-lost Seneca.
The ambassador followed his footman, who took
him to the negro quarter and made him enter a
sort of dirty cellar. Here two great negroes, clothed
in rags, were amusing themselves, like two children,
by making a scorpion and a cockroach fight.

" Is Mr. Seneca, who used to write for the
Temps, here ? "

One of the negroes, who was busy tying a thread
to his scorpion's leg, lazily lifted his head and
grunted :

" Here I am ! "

" I've got a letter for you from the Temps
newspaper."

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Jamaica and Cuba

" The newspaper ? Oh ! be blowed ! I've had
enough of that dirty work. I'm quite comfortable
here, and here I shall stay ! "

From that day no one has ever seen anything
more of Mr. Seneca, who won first prizes for
rhetoric and philosophy at a Paris lycee. He has
gone back to his old negro habits. His African
ancestry has been too much for that philosopher.

But it is not always the case.

At the present moment one of the most distin-
guished political men in Cuba is a coloured man
who asks to be given the post of Minister of Public
Education ; he deserves it ! But he won't get it !
People fear that he will favour his race, whose
assiduous attendance at the elementary schools
already puts the white children to shame. The fact
is still more marked at the University of Havana.
There are but few coloured youths among the
male students, because all high positions are
closed to coloured folk ; but in the female classes,
where they can work side by side with their white
sisters, thirty out of the fifty female students
are mulatto girls and half a dozen are negresses.

Between Uncle Tom's cabin, the refuge of dark
and bloody African superstitions, and that cabin

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The Fair Land of Central America

suddenly transformed into an arsenal of modern
science, the Cubans don't know which to choose ;
the uneducated negro constitutes a danger, and
the educated negro is no less dangerous. . . .
And unfortunately Uncle Sam can do nothing to
save the Cubans from Uncle Tom. The United
States' ten million negroes give them too much
to think about.

If consumption, the outcome of poverty and
debauch, which begins at eight years of age in
those countries, did not mow down whole troops
of these prolific natives, we should have something
else to do than to consider the problem of Latin
America and Yankee America.

There would be only one problem : the colour
problem.

The island of Cuba has suddenly begun to
express tremendous admiration for Spain. When
the Spanish training-ship, the Nautilus, stopped
at Havana during its six months' cruise in Ameri-
can waters, the casual visit of this handful of
Castilian sailors was made the pretext for a whole
week of public rejoicings and an extraordinary
exhibition of enthusiasm.

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Jamaica and Cuba

Havana decked herself out in red and yellow
flags — blood and dust : heroism and sterility ;
as long as that flag fluttered over her public
buildings it was cursed and hated, but now that
it floats over the dreams of the past its crude
colours have changed to purple and gold.

A month before the arrival of the corvette,
the Cuban newspapers every morning devoted
several columns of print to this expected event ;
the public squares were decorated with triumphal
arches, and the fashionable streets were so hidden
beneath streamers and flags stretching across
from one house to another that it was like walking
through multi-coloured tunnels. Please to observe
that the names of these streets, which used
to remind the Cubans of the hated Spanish
domination, were changed scarcely more than
ten years ago. Please to observe that those
triumphal arches stand close to the monument
erected to some Cuban students who were shot
for having insulted the tomb of a Spanish general.
Please to observe that by a strange coincidence
these newspapers at that very time were publish-
ing telegrams from Madrid announcing the publi-
cation of General Weyler's memoirs.

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The Fair Land of Central America

Weyler ! Havana's latest tyrant ; more de-
tested by the Cubans than ever Russian governor
was hated by the Poles ! Weyler ! the inventor
of those " concentration camps " in which he
herded the insurgents* wives and children, so that
the troops up country might be unable to get
food in the villages. When once he had got them
safe he omitted to feed those wives and children,
who died like flies. Havana was one of those
concentration camps.

However, newspapers, triumphal arches,
streamers, flags, all spoke of the amor indestruc-
tibile of Cuba for Spain, of the daughter for her
mother ! When the training-ship was signalled —
it was a little sailing-vessel of fifteen hundred
tons and it took four weeks to get from Vera
Cruz to Havana : the transatlantic boats only
take two days — the whole town went mad with
delight. All the inhabitants left their business
in order to rush up and down the streets as if
they were demented ; everyone wanted to see
the Nautilus enter the harbour. The rich men
of the town paid several hundred francs to be
allowed to embark on the tugs which were going
to meet the Spanish boat. The cannons thundered.

192

A STATION ON THE RAILWAY FROM MEXICO TO VERA CRUZ

COSTA RICA: ON THE PRAIRIES OF PERALTA

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Fireworks had been prepared for the evening,
but at midday the inhabitants could wait no
longer, and the rockets, Catherine-wheels, etc.,
were let off with a terrific explosion, but with
no more effect than a little cloud of smoke, just
as if the blue ceiling of heaven had suddenly
cracked and a little plaster had dropped through
the crevice. And the niggers, poor, good-natured
creatures, who, God knows, have no cause to
love Spain, took the opportunity afforded by
these universal rejoicings to send off crackers
in the streets, which operation affords the greatest
pleasure to the black race.

There was a constant succession of luncheon-
parties and picnics, balls and banquets, where the
astonished officers of the Nautilus received the
most ardent protestations of affection in toasts,
which were reproduced with great enthusiasm
in the newspapers next morning. The officers
did their best to reply suitably, and were
polite enough not to ask the Cubans why they
had not shown this affection for them ten years
ago, before the war ; neither did they ask what
Spain had done to deserve so much affection
after such bitter hatred.
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The Fair Land of Central America

Spain, alas ! had done nothing, and will
never do anything. Spain, as the mother of the
republics of Latin America, has borne too many
children. Her children have drained all her
strength ; the huge effort of the conquest, when
her best blood was shed on the plains of the New
World, reduced her to such a state of weakness
that she was nigh unto death. Poor mother !
she was so exhausted that she was forced to keep
quiet ; in future her ambition was limited to
making her children support her for three cen-
turies. Her efforts to keep them in leading-
strings, when they wanted to go their own way,
used up her last remaining strength. Spain is
like a decrepit old dowager who is about to die in
the odour of sanctity. The lover of her youth,
the heroic conquistador, long ago made way for
the father-confessor.

But though Spain may have done nothing,
the United States have been active ; so active,
in fact, that the Cubans have cause to feel uneasy.
The Yankee financiers are preparing a silver
yoke for the poor Cubans' shoulders ; that yoke
will be so grievously heavy that the Spanish
yoke of iron will seem almost light in comparison.

Jamaica and Cuba

The Cuban Creole feels that it is useless to struggle
against the terrible business men whom the New
York boats bring daily to his island. Slowly
but surely, with law but no mercy on their side,
they will reduce the planter of old days, the old
trader, to the role of employe* or clerk.

The Spanish colony, which is still the largest
and the richest of all the foreign colonies, has
cleverly exploited this ever-increasing dread to
the benefit of the Mother Country. This colony,
since the War of Independence, has adopted
an attitude of disdainful indifference. It stands
alone. It probably finds it more difficult to forgive
the Cuban rebel than the Yankee rival. It
much prefers the security afforded to it by the
American occupation to the worries of a native
government. Yet, such is the power of race
feeling, that local interests and private spite
are now being forgotten, and all are joining to-
gether to repel the intruder. The Northern
invader, the fair-haired, red-cheeked giant, cold
and methodical, who has coolly come to take
the management of the Central and Southern
races into his own hands, who forces the con-
quered to accept the English language, his morning

'95

The Fair Land of Central America

tub, his hideous costume, and his rough games,
and insolently says straight out that he despises
the lingo and the customs of Spanish-America ;
this Yankee who does everything he can to make
himself detested has aroused a feeling of universal
antipathy, not only in Cuba but in Panama,
in Mexico as in Buenos Ayres.

The Cubans' enthusiasm for the sailors of the
Nautilus reminds me of the enthusiasm displayed
fifteen years ago by the Parisians for the Russian
admiral Avellane's sailors. It was not that
Paris really cared so much for Russia, but she
wanted to show her hatred of Germany. In
Havana it is not so much that Spain is regretted
as that the United States are hated.

In what measure can this aversion impede
the triumphal march of the stronger race ? It
can help in that the latter, who means to rule
by fear, lacks the troops necessary to ensure
its supremacy. Now the United States have
no army. Do they possess a fleet ? What good
is an ironclad without a crew determined to win
or die ? The navy of the Stars and Stripes is
nothing but a band of many-coloured mercenaries.
Now these did all very well to bombard the

196

Jamaica and Cuba

Spaniards' old wooden boats when there was no
danger, but they would soon knuckle under
if they had to face one of those terrible duels
of artillery which had such a demoralizing effect
even on the bravest of the brave at the Battle
of Tsoushima.

If the Japanese navy ever beats the Ameri-
can navy, the United States will fall to pieces ;
fair-weather friends often turn tail in a sudden
squall ! The Southern and Western States would
then recover their autonomy. Perhaps . . . but
no one can be sure, for this would be an unprece-
dented event.

But one thing is quite certain, and that is
that from one end of Central America to the
other the Yankee prestige would fade away
into the past like a bad dream, leaving nothing
but a memory of bitter hatred.

There is not much sentiment about men and
matters in the New World. But sentiment,
on some future occasion, is destined to play an
important part, and the Yankees are very foolish
to shut their eyes to this fact.

It is in Havana that one really realizes how the

197

The Fair Land of Central America

lack of all intellectual intercourse makes a long
stay in this huge Spanish-America almost un-
bearable.

The novelty of the magnificent park-like
scenery of the West Indian Islands, the luminous
horizons of Panama, the high plateaux of Costa
Rica isolated from the rest of the world by lovely
virgin forests, were powerless to prevent me
feeling that something was wanting. In Cuba,
that great island, which is like the suburb of some
huge town, one finds men and women to com-
pensate for the loss of the glorious trees ; but I
must confess that the specimens of the human race
which I met there were terribly primitive in
their habits and customs.

Both Creoles, the children of a tropical clime,
and starving immigrants driven from Europe
by hunger, care for nothing outside their own
agricultural or commercial affairs ; they take no
interest in anything whatever, and live in a state
of intellectual penury of which our little European
towns can have no idea. Here are two examples
of their ignorance. In the best hotel in Santiago
de Cuba, a town containing sixty-five thousand
inhabitants, the hall-porter read on one of my

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Jamaica and Cuba

trunks the label of an hotel in Naples where I
had been during a tour in Italy.

" Where's Naples ? " he asked the cabman
who was helping him to carry my luggage.
" Where's Naples ? What part of the world is
it in ? "

The cabman knew all about it and said :
" Oh ! Naples is in Central America ! "
While in Havana I had a conversation with
the editor of one of its best newspapers. We
were discussing a question of local politics in
which he took the keenest interest. I recom-
mended him to take matters more calmly, to
remember that things do not last for ever, as
Spinoza said.

" Spinoza ! " said he, shaking his head. " Oh,
yes ! that German philosopher."

You can imagine that journalists who fancy
that Spinoza was a German, who write for a
public which believes that Naples is in Central
America, cannot produce anything very interest-
ing. During my stay in Havana I saw all the
best newspapers every day ; with the exception
of a few cablegrams in three lines on the latest
events on the planet and the everlasting article

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The Fail- Land of Central America

on the elections, all space not devoted to adver-
tising was filled with silly vapourings, written
in Keepsake style, that is to say unless Fate
is kind and has produced a sensational crime,
or some national festivity has given rise to some
enthusiastic outburst of patriotism.

The Cuban never reads anything else but his
newspapers. The famous Employes' Club, a
palatial building which cost seven millions to
build, where twenty-five thousand employes can
meet and talk together for the sum of five francs
a month, contains, it is true, besides a fencing-
school and a bar, a library of handsomely bound
books. The works of Alexandre Dumas pere
stand side by side with those of Georges Ohnet.
I don't know if anyone ever opens them, but I
do know by experience that no one ever looks
at Victor Hugo's works.

The library only possesses one book by him,
and the title of that book is : " By Royal
Command." Astonished at finding an unknown
work by our great French author I hastened
to take it down from its shelf ; on opening the
cover I perceived that the Cuban bookbinder
had taken " By Royal Command/' which was

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Jamaica and Cuba

printed on the first page, as the title of the book.
Not one of the twenty-five thousand members
of the club had asked for that book or pointed
out the bookbinder's error to the librarian.

The Spanish Antilles and the seventeen nations
of Latin America, peopled with forty million
inhabitants all speaking, with the exception of
the Brazilians, the same language, count for
nothing or next to nothing in the world of art
and science. The only professor who deserves
the title of savant, for he founded an interesting
museum of anthropology, is Dr. Montanet, a
Frenchman. In Central America I met two
or three historians, who take an interest in Indian
antiquities. I heard of two novels which had
lately been published, one in Lima, the other in
Bogota, in which the customs of Peru and Colom-
bia are described. Bogota is also the only town
in the New World which can boast of a School
of Art, if one can give the name of school to a
handful of painters who imitate Parisian or
Spanish art. That is all. In architecture and
furnishing everything is copied ; no one thinks
of trying to be original. All machinery and all
agricultural implements are imported irom Europe

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The Fair Land of Central America

and the United States. Finally, if we include
cookery among the sister arts, I must confess
that this art is absolutely in a state of barbarism.
It is atrocious.

Besides the profession to which he owes his
income, and the usual politics — which are a
profession also — the Spanish-American thinks of
one thing only : love. To love he owes his taste
for lyric poetry which he writes, if not perfectly,
at least with great assiduity. It seems that
Peru, Colombia and Guatemala all possess great
poets. The Peruvian, Jose Chocana, is considered
particularly gifted. As I am a foreigner I cannot
tell whether they are really great poets, but I
can quite see that they are very numerous, even
numberless. There is not a single newspaper
which does not print every morning long poems
in praise of love. The senorita's eyes, teeth, lips,
hair, hands and feet, are compared in turn to all
the beauties in heaven and on earth. It cannot
be denied that they are very much in love, but
their way of expressing their feelings is not
original.

People who try to be original come to a bad
end. Misunderstood by their confreres, and often

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Jamaica and Cuba

despised by the Muse who inspired them, they
soon begin to indulge in all sorts of eccentrici-
ties. During a visit to one of those little capi-
tals of Central America, I found that a native
d'Annunzio had scandalized all the inhabitants.
The poet had taken the opportunity afforded by a
beautiful moonlight night in order to conduct
his disciples, the local poetasters, to the cemetery.
When there, they disinterred the body of a
celebrated poet who had been dead for twenty
years at least ; the skull was washed in spiced
wine and used as a champagne-glass at a solemn
banquet in honour of the deceased poet.

When European decadent poets want to make
the respectable middle-classes " sit up/' they
write something in this style : —

"Let us rest with our feet reposing on the head of a forest lion,
While we smoke our opium in the skull of a new-born babe."

As the respectable middle-classes in Central
America never open a book, the decadents are
obliged to have recourse to deeds instead of
words. But the profession of poet is an expensive
affair. What are they to do when they have no
money ? Commit suicide ! A few years ago
a certain poet, a native of Bogota, killed himself

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The Fair Land of Central America

in the following manner. He was a great bearded
fellow who, after reading the works of Signor
d'Annunzio and Co., had become disgusted with
Colombia. As he was not rich enough to go to
Paris to live the life of his choice, he, like a senti-
mental seamstress, bought a quantity of flowers
and dozens of perfumed wax candles, dressed
himself in his best clothes, laid himself down
upon his bed, and then shot himself through
the heart. He was buried outside the walls of
the cemetery. Colombia is the only country
in South America which still remains Catholic
to the verge of fanaticism. His mother and sisters
had to do public penance in the Cathedral in
order that Christian folk might forgive them
for being related to a reprobate.

That is why it is dangerous to think in a country
where no one thinks. If you want to turn your
thoughts to good account and to avoid finding
yourself in Bedlam, you must learn to think
properly. If you think too much about certain
subjects, you are sure to come to grief. Luckily
for Central America this seldom happens.

204

MEXICO

More mistaken ideas — A priestly paradise — Twelve million
Indians — Priest-ridden natives — Cruelty to children — An
archbishop's savings — Madrid in rags — Four hundred thou-
sand inhabitants and three hundred and fifty churches — Saint
Michael as a ballet-dancer — Ill-bred Yankees — The gods of
Montezuma and Torquemada — In honour of the twelve
apostles — Cock-fighting — Female saints — The scandal of the
" Forty-one " Club — Gambetta's cook — Mexican cookery —
A revolver shot — A menagerie of human beasts — The prisoners'
bath — A novelty in prisons — An exhibition of ugliness — An
American Rome — Bravery and religion — Lack of poetry —
Prosperous foreigners — Why Pan-Iberianism is nothing but
a chimera — Yankee ignorance — From Pullman-car to Embassy
— The ruins of Palenque — An uninhabitable country — The
great bear of the Rocky Mountains — Tragedy in the gold-
mining district.

I REACHED Mexico in company with a Breton
colonel, a Russian dancer, a Spanish priest
and two Irish nuns. These were the first-class
passengers on the French transatlantic from
Havre which I joined at Havana. I mention
them because soldier, dancer, priest and nuns
were good specimens of^the kind of immigrant

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The Fair Land of Central America

who, I fondly imagined, would be plentiful in
the Mexican republic. But I soon found that I
was mistaken. The Mexican is neither quarrel-
some nor amorous.

The Breton colonel had come to the New World,
not because he loved fighting, but because he
wanted to escape persecution at the hands of
his fellow-officers on account of his very decided
reactionary opinions. The Russian dancer had
left Paris, not in search of new conquests in
Mexico, but simply in order to escape from a
jealous old admirer who, while he said good-bye
to her on the quay, shed bitter tears and begged
her not to leave him. In vain ! Work means
freedom, and the dancer was going to Mexico
in order to earn her living by executing plastic
poses in pink tights in a music-hall. She was
dressed very quietly, and spent all her time
nursing the other passengers' babies. The Spanish
priest, dressed in a long grey linen cassock and
a velvet cap which made me take him for a grocer
at first, had a sloping head and the profile of a
sanctimonious sheep. For the last thirty
years he had been priest in an Indian parish
near Vera Cruz which he invited me to visit.

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Mexico

He was the dirtiest man I have ever seen. He
had certainly been to Europe and back again
in the same collar and shirt. I shuddered at the
idea of sleeping at his presbytery, and I took
care to stand at a safe distance while I thanked
him very politely.

As to the Irish nuns, they were going to found
a convent where little Indian maids will be
taught how to save their souls and to do fine
needlework, and where the community will make
quite a nice pile of money while the catechu-
mens, on condition that they sew fourteen hours
a day, will eventually be able to enter the Kingdom
of Heaven. This is what happens in a good many
religious establishments. One of these nuns
was young and pretty ; she looked as if she
would have enjoyed a good laugh, but the elder
nun made her sit on a bench by her side throughout
the voyage.

The colonel and the dancer were casual immi-
grants, while the priest and the nuns were going
home, so to speak.

Mexico is a perfect paradise upon earth for
religious communities. I noticed this fact in
the first town which I visited on my way to the

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The Fair Land of Central America

capital. For Mexico is eight thousand feet
above the level of the sea, and it is dangerous
to go there without stopping at least once on
the way. Doctors recommend new-comers to
stop, when they have ascended one thousand
feet, at a rather wretched-looking town called
Orizaba.

Orizaba has sixty thousand inhabitants. I
thought that I had tumbled into the midst of
a religious community. One sees nothing but
churches, and the inhabitants* chief amusement
seems to be saying their prayers ; for, although
my visit did not coincide with any festival,
the faithful seemed to be going to and from
church without intermission. Their dark, fanati-
cal faces, their rags and huge hats remind one
of the pilgrims of the Breton Pardons. When
you get near them you see that they are Red
Indians.

Mexico is not a Spanish republic, like the
States of Central America which I had seen
hitherto, and like all those of South America.
It is an Indian State. It is the only Indian
State. With the exception of uncultivated Hon-
duras and worn-out Guatemala, the inhabitants

208

Mexico

of all the other republics are almost pure white ;
so white are they that the Indian blood, dating
from the Conquest, is hardly perceptible. As
for the few millions of natives who dwell in the
forests, they never come to the towns. Now
it is quite different in Mexico, where out of
fourteen million subjects twelve million are Red
Indians. The present President of the Republic,
Senor Porfirio Diaz, is of mixed blood, as was
General Benito Juarez, the President who over-
threw the Emperor Maximilian. The Creole
of Spanish descent seems to be nothing but a
foreigner here ; although he owns valuable hacien-
das he only seems to do so on sufferance, like
the French Provenpal who wants to monopolize
the country's trade, or the Yankee who is equally
anxious to buy its mines and railroads. Neither
Creole, Frenchman, nor Yankee seems thoroughly
at home.

The genuine, the real Mexican is a thick-set,
cadaverous-looking boor who peoples the country
and swarms in the towns, with his flat, broad
face, small eyes, the face of an Asiatic but more
massive and more sleepy-looking. With the
exception of his enormous felt sugar-loaf hat,
o 209

The Fair Land of Central America

as big as an umbrella and as heavy as lead, he
dresses like an Asiatic coolie in a shirt and a
pair of linen drawers, is equally sober and long-
suffering. The Chinese origin is very noticeable
in the Indian, except that in this case it is a
priest-ridden Chinaman. There were two kinds
of priests : the priests of the time of the Aztec
domination, and the priests of the Most Holy
Inquisition ; both ruled by fear.

Everyone is familiar with the Aztec's mon-
strous religion, those sacrifices which demanded
twenty thousand human victims every year,
and their sacred banquets when they ate the
flesh of little children, whom they had literally
frightened to death, in honour of their gods.
On the occasion of the consecration of the Temple
of the God of War, which was built in Mexico
some years before the Spanish invasion, a frightful
hecatomb of seventy thousand captives took
place.

A nation which could obey such priests could
neither be very intelligent nor very cheerful.
To the Spanish priests they owed slavery in
this world and the prospect of hell in the next.
Slavery has ceased to exist ; it has been replaced

210

Mexico

by a ridiculous salary, but the fear of hell con-
tinues to dominate and awe these minds which
have lived in a state of terror for so many cen-
turies. It will be a long time before they can
free themselves.

The only people who are fat and jolly in that
country wear cassocks. Each priest is king
and pacha of his little parish. I could hardly
believe the wonderful stories of their morality
and immorality, and I asked a good Catholic
in the capital to tell me if they were really true.
But the latter was obliged to confess :

" What can you expect ? Priests are human
beings like you and me. Our padres are not
made of stone. ... Of course there are excep-
tions to the rule."

But there is one thing which is not an exception,
and that is the Mexican clergy's wonderful
knack of acquiring wealth. It is not yet fifty
years since President Juarez confiscated all
their goods and chattels, and they are already
richer than ever ! When the Archbishop of
Mexico died a short time ago, he left twenty
millions behind him.

The Catholic with whom I was conversing

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The Fair Land of Central America

pointed out to me the superiority of such a
religious race and the advantages to be reaped
by order and obedience. That is all very well
for Dives. But if poor Lazarus, who lives in
ignorance, dirt and poverty all the days of his
life, who drinks brandy and eats pimento, gives
his last farthing to buy a candle for the Virgin
and expires in dread of hell-fire, could know and
understand, he might find that this theory
left much to be desired — at least, from his point

of view.

^'

The European tourist who comes to Mexico
via Havana is able to admire one after the other
the two biggest, the only two big towns in tropical
America. In old days Mexico used to suffer by
comparison. After seeing the Cuban capital, a
maritime town with European luxuries, where
people turn night into day, where the tramways
run day and night without ceasing, the deserted,
depressing Aztec capital, with its long, dusty
streets, crowded with silent Indians, enclosed
by mountains on all sides, impressed the traveller
with a sense of poverty and neglect.

Things have changed since those times. For

212

Mexico

the last five or six years the two towns, once dirty
and badly paved, have been attending to their
toilet, pulling down their squalid slums and
building villas and palaces. But Mexico has
won the prize in the race for civilization and
modern improvements.

The tobacco and sugar island has not been
able to contend with the copper and silver mines,
with the huge empire so peculiarly favoured
by nature with its hot, temperate and cold
climates, five times bigger than France, where
two million European mongrels exploit twelve
million Indians and where a clever man, Porfirio
Diaz, v/ho for the last thirty years has played
the role of dictator, has shown us that despotism
is not altogether without its uses when it is
tempered by peace and order.

Although Havana is a very poor imitation of
Barcelona, Mexico can rival Madrid in the matter
of beautiful public buildings and private resi-
dences. But those wide streets lined with huge
shops, those broad avenues crowded with the
local millionaires' luxurious automobiles — so
magnificent are they with their gold and silver
fittings, that they almost look like strong boxes

213

The Fair Land of Central America

on wheels — all this pomp and ostentation are
lost, alas ! among the swarms of miserable,
barefooted creatures, shivering with cold, hunger
and fever, horribly dirty, blear-eyed, abject,
covered with vermin and as innumerable as the
stars or as their own fleas. Mexico may be a
second Madrid ; but if it is, it is a Madrid in
rags !

Imagine London suddenly invaded by all the
starving inhabitants of Ireland, or Paris inhabited
solely by the poor populations of Brittany, and
you will be able to get a faint idea of the contrast
between the Mexican capital and the people
whom one sees in its streets.

The Indian workman gets one franc twenty-
five centimes for fifteen hours' work. I was
assured that he could live quite comfortably
on that sum on the haciendas and in the mines
up country. I don't know anything about
the matter. I only know that last year, in
a big spinning-mill in Orizaba, they had to
shoot four hundred strikers before their fellow-
workmen could be induced to resume the
yoke.

Be this as it may, in the big towns and in

214

Mexico

Mexico in especial, many a workman who gets
fifteen piastres wages at the end of a month's
toil, spends ten piastres on gambling, three on
pulque (the fermented juice of the aloe) and only
gives his wife two piastres, representing the sum
of five francs, to feed and clothe the whole family.
This is the cause of the general cachexy, con-
sumption and such terrible infantile mortality
that parents, who usually have a child every
year, think themselves lucky if they can manage
to rear one or two out of the lot.

Social questions do not exist in Mexico. Alcohol
and Catholicism keep the natives well occupied.
Mexico, a town of four hundred thousand in-
habitants, can boast of three hundred and fifty
churches !

The President-dictator for life, Porfirio Diaz,
is nearly eighty years of age. The question as
to who will be his successor is as yet unanswered.
Will the old revolutionary ardour burst forth
again ? Most people think that it no longer exists.
Thirty years of peace have deprived the handful
of ambitious waverers of their leaders, for the
latter have filled their pockets and got what they
wanted. And then the Yankee capitalists are

215

The Fair Land of Central America

on the look out ; they would soon show their
teeth. . . . But . . . but . . . although there is
little chance of a political revolution, it is quite
possible that there may be a religious upheaval.
The Catholic clergy will lose their all-powerful
protectress, the kind-hearted, strong-minded
Sefiora Porfirio Diaz, who is thirty years younger
than her husband and who has tremendous
influence over his mind.

It was thanks to her that the President sus-
pended the old laws made by Benito Juarez,
forbidding religious communities to own landed
property. His successor's wife is sure to be quite
as pious, for the priests rule over all the women-
folk out there. But will the new President's
wife be as charming and as powerful as her
predecessor ? All the white men in Mexico are
disbelievers and freemasons. When a woman
HO longer stands between the clergy and those
thousands of believers in nothing, Benito Juarez*
confiscations will begin again.

I am glad I saw Mexico before this came about.
One may say what one likes about the Catholic
religion, but everyone must allow that it is pic-
turesque. I shall never forget a statue of Saint

216

Mexico

Michael in the Cathedral at Orizaba. It stood
beside a life-sized statue in wax of Jesus Christ
fastened to the pillar and covered with horrible,
gaping wounds, the face eaten with ulcers,
a more hideous sight even than a horse
disembowelled by a bull on the sand of the
arena.

By the side of this monstrous specimen of
Spanish realistic art, Saint Michael, with a girlish
face, wearing a spangled bolero, his naked legs
protruding from beneath a ballet-dancer's gauze
skirts, was cutting a caper on a cardboard cloud.
He was supposed to represent the joys of Paradise.
When we get there, if we ever do so, we shall
be amused. But, really, reverend gentlemen,
your idea of Paradise is not exactly refined !
If ever the day comes when the Mexican churches
are despoiled of their treasures, I hope some-
body will kindly tell me the name and address
of the gentleman who buys Saint Michael of
Orizaba.

In Mexico, as in the whole of Spanish-America,
there is only one question : the Yankee problem,
the North American business-man's threat to

217

The Fair Land of Central America

monopolize the nation's riches. However, this
threat, which will not be realized for some time
still in South America, has ceased to be a threat
for Central America ; it has become a certainty
and will have to be settled sooner or later. Are
the United States going to devour Mexico or are
they not ?

The attack, at present, is more gradual and
less marked than one would think ; they are
making a good show of resistance. So far, the
North Americans have only hankered after
the mines and the railroads. The agricultural
haciendas are still in the hands of the chief Mexican
families. The trade of the capital is monopolized
by a colony of prosperous and industrious French-
men whom the United States will find it very
difficult to oust. And what is more, the Yankees'
army of invasion is badly organized. A diplo-
matist, who had just returned from the inaugura-
tion fetes given by the Mexican Automobile
Club, confided to me his impressions in the
following terms :

" What can you expect ? I came back by
Washington. Nobody is more willing and ready
than I to acknowledge the good qualities of

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Mexico

the Americans when they happen to be well-
educated and refined, and I cannot shut my
eyes to the faults and failings of Mexican society.
And yet, many members of that society still
revere the traditions of Spanish courtesy. I
can quite understand why they shrink from
that rabble of rotten financiers and vulgar, noisy
adventurers from Texas who think that they
are the superior race and that they are going
to have things all their own way ! "

The Mexican senoras complain of the bad
manners of the Yankees who swagger about all
over the place, jostle against them in the tram-
cars and restaurants, and deafen everyone with
their loud, shrill voices. I am only repeating
what I was told. I must confess that I myself
never remarked this rude behaviour. The Ameri-
cans whom I met in Mexico were perhaps less
polite than the Mexicans, who are extremely
polite, but I always found them civil and even
friendly.

When I say this, I am told that I didn't see
enough of them, and that I didn't stay there long
enough. I bow to the superior judgment of the
fair sex.

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The Fair Land of Central America

The judgment of my own sex was not more
favourable. After hearing of the ill-breeding
of the Yankee " hustler," I now heard of his
dishonesty.

An old Mexican general once said to me in
great wrath :

" The American only comes here to swagger
about and to dupe us. He buys for a few dollars
the right to work some mine — he doesn't care
much whether it is likely to pay or not — puts
the document into his right pocket and a specimen
of quartz into his left pocket, and goes back
to the United States where he starts a company
with a capital of several millions ... on paper,
of course. The only expense incurred by the
company is for advertising, and that is done in
fine style. As soon as the shares can command
a price and when they find people foolish enough
to buy them, the directors sell out their own
shares and declare the company bankrupt. It
is then discovered that the company was formed
in some State where the laws are particularly
lax, and so the trick is played. That is why we
have just made a new law concerning mines,
by which all companies, without regard to their

220

Mexico

origin, are subjected to Mexican law. The
Yankees say that we boycott them. We are only
protecting ourselves from sharpers — that is
all ! "

My old Mexican general exaggerated somewhat.
I know a certain American mining company
which does not exploit the pockets of its share-
holders, but which works its land to such good
effect that it can afford to pay its chief engineer
a salary of two millions a year.

Be this as it may, the Yankee financier is not a
persona grata in Mexico. The American ambas-
sador in Mexico constantly has to interfere and
to use all his authority in order that his com-
patriots may be treated like the other foreigners.
If the Mexican Government dared, it would expel
all the Yankees within twenty-four hours. It
dares not do so, and it is not very likely that
it will ever dare to do so, until the day
when . . .

Uncle Sam tells the truth when he says that
his little excursions into other people's countries
are only for commercial purposes and not for
any political ends. However, as he is detested
by the Latin republics, he will never get them

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The Fair Land of Central America

to tolerate him except by using force. This ex-
plains President Roosevelt's imperialism. In
the case of Central America he need only hold
the sword over its head. But he will have to
draw the weapon from its scabbard if he wants
to keep Mexico in order.

The Mexican accuses the Yankee of being
greedy, ignorant and vulgar. As I have tried
to show you, the Mexican is not altogether
mistaken, at least as far as his opinion con-
cerning the adventurer or the seedy financier
who comes to spy out the nakedness of the
land.

But the Northerner, in his turn, pretends to
despise the Spanish-Americans in general, and the
Mexican in particular. He says straight out
that the Mexican has " all his old Spanish an-
cestors' faults and none of their good qualities.'*
He is prejudiced ! What virtues belong essen-
tially to the Spanish race ? Sobriety, courtesy
and bravery. Anyone who can say that the
Mexican Creole has no good qualities must be
biassed. Then again, in the matter of vices,
when the North American accuses his Southern

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Mexico

neighbour of being dirty, lazy and cruel we must
allow that he is not far out.

In Central America, as in Cuba, I myself noticed
dirt and laziness on all sides. I should have said
they were not cruel, had I not been to Mexico.
One cannot deny the fact that the Mexican
seems incapable of sharing the European's feelings
of pity and horror at the sight of other people's
sufferings and especially the sufferings of dumb
animals.

It is scarcely likely that the offspring of an
Indian mother and a Spanish father could be
very tender-hearted. Among all the exponents
of our different creeds, it was left to the priests
of the Most Holy Inquisition and the Aztec religion
to invent a god, a sort of chief executioner, who
delighted in torturing his worshippers. It cer-
tainly did not occur to the Assyrians of old to
institute ambulances for their wounded enemies.
A certain bas-relievo at Nineveh represents a
king of Assour blinding with the end of a pointed
reed whole rows of kneeling prisoners with all
the outward calmness of a telephone-girl seated
at her desk and carefully driving each peg into
its proper hole.

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The Fair Land of Central America

In acting thus, the royal personage probably
wished to save himself any further annoyance
rather than to do honour to his gods. However,
we must turn to the god of Montezuma and Tor-
quemada if we want to see the celestial ogre
who lives on blood and burnt flesh.

The Aztec priests inflicted long and cruel
tortures upon their victims. Twenty thousand
men passed yearly through the hands of these
saintly torturers, who accomplished their religious
butchery in the open air, under the blue sky
of heaven, on the lofty terrace of a five-storied
temple which once stood on the site now occupied
by the present Cathedral of Mexico.

Cortez' henchmen were not less zealous. Some
of their number made a vow to strangle
twelve Indians daily in honour of the twelve
apostles !

Now that slavery has been abolished, the de-
scendants of those Spaniards and Aztecs can no
longer exercise their cruelty on their fellow-
creatures ; so they vent their spite upon the un-
fortunate animals. Here are a few anecdotes :

A huge tortoise, which had been harpooned off
the coast of Vera Cruz, was kept alive for three

224

Mexico

whole days outside a restaurant in Mexico.
Each customer, as he entered, either kicked it
on the back or on the head. Some of these brutes
even tried to poke out its eyes with the ends of
their umbrellas. There were roars of laughter
when anyone managed to draw blood.

A French lady had to threaten her Indian cook
with instant dismissal if she continued to pluck
her chickens and pigeons alive without taking
the trouble to wring their necks.

I will say nothing about bull-fights : everyone
is familiar with these exhibitions of brutality.
Here, as in Spain, the sight of a helpless horse
being disembowelled is considered jnost interesting.
I will say no more. . . .

But cock-fighting beats everything in the
matter of cruelty. The Mexican lower orders
spend the greater part of their earnings in gam-
bling. The Mexican working man likes to watch
cock-fights for the pleasure of betting, not for
the pleasure of seeing two birds slowly peck each
other to death ; but the horrible part of the
thing is that the sight of the poor creatures'
terrible sufferings seems to have no effect upon
him. The two cocks are fed upon corn soaked
p 225

The Fair Land of Central America

in alcohol. Their owners excite them at the
last moment by plucking out a handful of feathers
and by spitting in their faces. When a steel
spur, ten centimetres long, has been attached to
the left leg of each bird, they are let loose. Some-
times the first blow from that steel spur stabs the
adversary to the heart. But it usually happens
that the two birds go on hitting each other
on the head with their beaks for many minutes
at a time. The stronger attacks the weaker
and soon reduces him to a horrible state. . . .
I really cannot describe what then happens. . . .
I looked at the faces of the spectators, Indian
workmen, draped in their thick striped woollen
blankets, or Mexican cowboys wearing their
tall, sugar-loaf hats. Not one of them winced
at this horrible martyrdom. The only thing they
-think about is whether they will lose their bet
or not. I won't say that they enjoy watching
the poor beast's sufferings ; they don't even
seem to see that it is suffering. They have no
more feeling than a stick or a stone. ... I am
perfectly well aware that cock-fighting is practised
in France and in Belgium. But Mexico is not
Europe. I compared the two Americas. Now

226

Mexico

the Yankee whom I saw at bull-fights out there
always shuts his eyes when the bull thrusts its
horn into the horse's side. He can't stand it,
and he seldom goes a second time. Although the
Anglo-Saxon is a great hand at betting, you never
see him at a cock-fight. What he likes is a boxing-
match with its marvellous display of pluck and
endurance ; although it is a brutal sight, he revels
in it, because he knows that the two opponents
have accepted the ordeal of their own free will.
But the martyrdom and the agony of an animal,
the quivering flesh, the warm life-blood ebbing
away, the dying horse whose limbs twitch con-
vulsively, the bleeding cock — such sights shock
the fair-haired, pink-cheeked Northerner from
New York, Chicago or Saint Louis, in all of which
towns one finds marble banks, highly polished
oak bureaux, and gentlemen in spotless linen,
but where the slaughter-houses are hidden away
out of sight, where a man can die in his bed, and
the beast in some quiet corner, without any un-
necessary suffering.

After all, cruelty and tender-heartedness, like
Pascal's Good and Evil, are perhaps only a
question of latitude and longitude. The inhabi-

227

The Fair Land of Central America

tants of hot countries think nothing of nature
naked and unadorned. People who live in cold
climates are only accustomed to see her arrayed
in a great coat. No wonder we don't always
agree.

" The women are saints, the men are worth-
less ! " Such is the opinion I frequently heard
expressed on the respective value of the two
sexes in Spanish -America. People who know
America well tell me exactly the same thing.
It is true that the women are saints ; but they
would find it rather difficult to be anything else,
for they are kept shut up at home and are obliged
to lead quite a monastic life. Travellers in Latin
America are much surprised to find that the
wife is virtually imprisoned in her nursery and
her kitchen ; this custom, which the Spaniards
learned from the Arabs, in a big town like
Mexico, produces the most curious results, in
strange contrast with the customs of the French
colony.

A highly distinguished Frenchman, a poet
and a good man of business into the bargain,
who is very popular with the Mexicans on account

228

Mexico

of his amiable disposition and who has already
published one very interesting volume of " Aztec
Poems " describing old Aztec customs, lately
went to pay a visit to a distant hacienda accom-
panied by a European financier whom he wished
to introduce to the haciendado. The rich pro-
prietor, having received a letter announcing
their visit, sent a carriage to the station to meet
them, received them most kindly, gave them a
magnificent dinner and placed all his best rooms
at their disposal. He was all alone. His wife and
daughters had gone away that very morning
to stay with some neighbours, where they re-
mained as long as any foreigners were under
their roof !

This is local etiquette with a vengeance !
The women of the family are never introduced
to foreigners. In the capital, however, at certain
official banquets to which the ladies of the Euro-
pean colony are invited, the Mexican big-wigs
are obliged to bring their wives. A young diplo-
matist told me how he dined one evening beside
a charming lady. On rising from the table,
he plucked up courage to ask if she had a day
at home.

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The Fair Land of Central America

The young lady replied in the negative ; how-
ever, she confessed that her female cousins and
friends came to see her on Fridays.

" Well, if you will allow me, I shall do myself
the honour "

" No ! no ! " cried the husband, interrupting
the conversation ; " no, my dear fellow, I know
that you are much too busy. Pray don't take
the trouble to come. ... It isn't the custom
here/'

Then with a hearty shake of the would-
be visitor's hand he hurried off his docile
spouse.

The members of the diplomatic corps are not
invited to any evening festivities, which, indeed,
are only family parties. If they are invited, they
always decline the invitation. The representative
of a certain powerful nation, on arriving in Mexico,
wanted to put an end to this ostracism, and an-
nounced his intention of giving a huge reception, for
which he sent out quantities of invitations. Most
of the invited guests did not even take the trouble
to reply ; the others refused point-blank.

What was the reason of this behaviour ? Do
the natives despise the foreigners ? Oh ! dear,

230

Mexico

no. They are the best of friends at the club,
in the street, in the office ; they slap one another
on the back most affectionately ; they call one
another by their Christian names ; but you
may know a Mexican intimately for ten years
and you will never see his wife. Are these hus-
bands jealous ? No, they are not even jealous.
Many of these men have mistresses whom they
invite you to meet without telling you that they
are not legally married ; so that you may go
on calling at their houses for a long time, thinking
that you are calling on the lawful spouse, until
you suddenly discover that the real wife lives
in quite another house to which you are never
invited. It is a question of amour-propre. The
Mexican senora is badly educated. Her life of
retirement makes her very shy. She doesn't
know what to talk about. Her husband would
feel humiliated were she to be compared with
foreign women who have been emancipated by
travelling and constant companionship with men.
And then, in the present state of morals in Mexico,
a wife who devotes herself to her servants and
to her children suits him down to the ground,
and he has no intention of allowing her to adopt

231

The Fair Land of Central America

the free and easy manners and habits of the
European woman.

The Mexican husband is not fond of his home.
How can he be so ? Reading, works of art,
intellectual conversation are closed subjects to
him, owing to his lack of native wit and his
want of education. He studies from ten to sixteen
years of age — but what studies they are ! The
professors whom I questioned on this subject
told me that they calculated that the Mexican
student misses school every other day either
because he doesn't feel well, because the weather
is too fine or too bad, or simply because he feels
lazy.

When he grows up, if he happens to be fairly
well off, he does nothing ; if he happens to have
more money than is good for him he plays the
fool. Once upon a time, the gilded youth of
Mexico formed themselves into a rowdy club
called " The Forty-one. " Its list of members
contained all the best names in the Republic,
including the President's son-in-law. Their eccen-
tricities scandalized the capital, which in some
things is rather strait-laced. Rumours of their
misdeeds reached the ear of the President. About

232

Mexico

nine o'clock one evening, just as dinner was being
finished, the President's son-in-law rose from
table in order to join his rowdy companions,
when the all-powerful father-in-law begged him
to sit down again and for once to spend the evening
at home. The son-in-law obeyed — luckily for
him ! That very night the leaders of the " Forty-
one " were arrested by order of the dictator
and banished to the wild and distant province
of Yucatan.

President Diaz is a Roman and a worthy
follower of Augustus who cleansed Rome of its
licentious patricians and sent Ovid to drink
mare's milk in Scythia.

This was the end of the famous " Forty-one
Club," whose former leader, shielded by his
imperial relations, henceforth contented himself
with astonishing Mexico by more harmless feats
of valour. To him belongs the splendid automobile
copied from that belonging to the German Kaiser ;
it is so covered with gold and copper that it
shines like the sun. Each lantern is in the
shape of a tower supported by two lions ap-
parently made of solid gold. A carriage like that
would make quite a sensation in Paris. But

233

The Fair Land of Central America

we must make some allowance for those new
countries.

I was assured that there were at least one
thousand automobiles in Mexico ; that is even
more in proportion than we have in Paris. How-
ever, automobiles do not eat the largest holes
in the Mexican's budget. Here, as in Spanish-
America, love comes first. Buenos Ayres, Rio
and Havana are the Eldorado of the demi-monde.
At first one imagines that Mexico is more severe
in its morals. Perhaps that is because it is less
known. . . .

That is why the Mexican women run the risk
of remaining saints to the end of the chapter.
Female saints are so docile and so easily
gulled.

Mexico is not exactly the place for people
who only live for pleasure. It has three hundred
and fifty churches, but only two theatres, one for
opera and one for drama ; both are small and
poor-looking. The Mexicans are not a nation
of theatre-goers. The rich have travelled too
much and seen too many good performers. The
lower classes prefer bull-fights and cinemato-

234

I

A BULL-FIGHT IN MEXICO
Reproduced by permission of Messrs. Waite, Mexico City

Mexico

graphs. The theatres can only count upon the
middle classes.

The public censor complicates matters con-
siderably. When translations of our plays are
given in Mexico, the theatrical managers have
to alter them to suit the country's code of
morals.

The only smart restaurant in the place is a
victim to official squeamishness. Private supper-
rooms are not allowed ; by private supper-rooms,
I mean that small rooms, separated by a door
from the inquisitive diners in the public dining-
room, are quite unknown out there. However,
there are some small salons without doors, so
that couples supping alone can be seen by every-
body. The result is that the whole town soon
knows that Sefior So-and-so supped on a certain
date with Sefior a or Sefiorita So-and-so. The
scandal becomes public property instead of being
known only to a few ; and so no harm is done
to the public's morals.

The proprietor of that restaurant is a French-
man, of course, and by no means an ordinary
one ! He used to be Gambetta's cook in the old
days when the former tribune was President of

235

The Fair Land of Central America

the Chamber of Deputies. Gambetta sometimes
deigned to go into his kitchen and to take a lesson
in the art of eating. He used to sit down, call for
beer and touch glasses with the staff, which
consisted of six head-cooks and any number of
scullions. My readers may think that these
kitchen arrangements were rather too elaborate
for one man alone. But Gambetta was not
content.

" Ah 1 my boys ! this is all very fine for the
President of the Chambre, but wait until we
get to the Elysee and then you'll see, you'll
see ! "

As appendicitis finished Gambetta's career and
prevented the " boys " seeing anything more,
the future Paillard of Mexico went to be under-
cook to one of the Rothschilds. But the Baronne
de Rothschild was not very tactful in her treat-
ment of her head-cook. One day when she had
summoned him to her drawing-room to receive
her orders, she flew into a passion with a footman
who had forgotten to shut the door.

The head-cook rushed forward to shut it ;
the baroness stopped him, crying in a shrill
voice :

236

Mexico

' Don't touch the wainscot with your greasy
hands ! "

Now the head-cook happened to be very proud
of his exquisite cleanliness. He turned pale and,
showing the great lady his hands, which were
whiter than those of a prelate, said :

" Madame la baronne, if my hands are too
dirty to touch your wainscot, they must be far
too dirty to do your cooking. I shall do so no
longer."

A quarter of an hour later he and his entire
staff left the Rothschilds' hotel. The poor fellow
paid dearly for his folly. He had a carbuncle
on the nape of his neck. Blood-poisoning set
in and he died a few weeks later. Vatel's death
was more romantic, perhaps, for it is more poetical
to die of a sword-thrust through one's body than
to die of a carbuncle ; but does it prove a deeper
feeling of professional dignity ?

His staff separated after his death ; and so
tragic fate brought him who had been cook to
Gambetta and to a member of the Rothschild
family, to Mexico.

His restaurant is the only one where the waiters
are trained in the European fashion and are

237

The Fair Land of Central America

really clean. The other restaurants leave much
to be desired in this respect. Indian servants
are good creatures, I am sure ; but their scowling
faces and their bushy wigs made such an un-
favourable impression upon me, that I always
chose a table against the wall. I did not like
to feel that those fellows were standing behind
my chair. Whenever I asked for a knife, I
always felt as if they were going to stab me in
the back.

What can I say about Mexican cookery ?
The most original dish I tasted was a dish of
aguacates rolled in tortillas and cooked in sour milk.
I did not ask for a second help. We may change
our religion and even our morals during our
course through life, but our tastes seldom change.
It is easier to subdue our consciences than our
appetites. The aguacate eaten raw without the
pastry and the sour milk is quite delicious.
It rather resembles the fruit of the egg-plant,
and it tastes like an artichoke, only the pulp is
more tender. It is imported to Europe where
unfortunately it fetches a very high price. To-
gether with the cabbage tree, it is one of the
best vegetables in tropical America, as the Manilla

238

Mexico

mango is the best fruit. A frozen mango, eaten
with a spoon as one eats an ice, is food for the
gods, that is to say if the said gods don't mind
a slight flavour of turpentine.

There are no cafes in Mexico, only bars where
one drinks standing before the counter as in
America. If you want to sit down, you must go
to the club. The Americans have a Golf Club ;
the Spaniards frequent another club where they
can play cards ; the French prefer a club where
they can have a game of billiards ; and the cream
of Mexican society, together with the cream of
the foreign colony, goes to the Jockey Club.
The Jockey Club is lodged in a charming minia-
ture palace of glazed bricks ; the Mexican dandies
assemble daily under its porch in order to watch
the procession of carriages moving up and down
the fashionable Calle de San Francisco. It is
considered " the thing " for friends to salute
one another by quickly waving the right hand
in the air like a fan. This occupation seems to
afford the Mexicans exquisite pleasure, for
nothing in the world can make them miss coming
every morning and making the familiar gesture
a hundred times a day. But I fancy that the

239

The Fair Land of Central America

real reason for their fondness for this very un-
interesting pastime is that they hope, by going
regularly to the club, to meet some fascinating
lady. For love-making figures largely in the
list of pleasures to be obtained in Mexico.
And love is responsible for many family jars.
While I was there a general, over seventy years
of age, killed his young wife in a fit of jealousy.
She was almost young enough to be his grand-
daughter.

Mexican husbands do not often use their
revolvers in order to avenge their wounded
honour ; such tragedies are rare. Love, unlike
the automobile, is within everybody's reach ;
and it has far fewer accidents to answer for
than the snorting monster on four wheels.

Mexico has two prisons : an old Spanish con-
vent where five thousand prisoners are huddled
together in fetid courtyards, and a brand-new
model penitentiary, a sort of huge steel safe
where six hundred picked prisoners go through
the process of being reformed according to the
rules of psychology and modern hygiene.

You must inspect both of them if you want to

240

Mexico

compare our modern methods with the routine
of the old system.

The Penitenciana is conducted on " the solitary
confinement " system. A round iron tower repre-
sents the central turret from which a warder,
day and night, watches over the cages which are
arranged in a circle around it.

It reminded me of a menagerie, and a menagerie
of very ferocious beasts into the bargain, for the
cages are all very solidly built and the windows
are screened. The partitions are made of two
sheets of steel between which a layer of gravel
is heaped. Supposing the wild beast imprisoned
behind those walls could manage to bore a hole
through that steel partition, the gravel would
immediately begin to drop through the opening
and attract the warder's attention. It is a highly
ingenious invention.

No one ever escapes from that prison ! A
single iron crow-bar bolts twenty doors at once.
A fly could not hide in any of those well-lighted
corridors.

If the electricity, which is supplied by the town,
should happen to fail at any time, the warder
only has to apply a match to two furnaces, which
Q 241

The Fair Land of Central America

are always stuffed up to the very mouth with
wood, in order to set their own private dynamo
working.

This is how twenty men manage to keep six
hundred in order ; silence is only broken by the
superintendents' whistle and sometimes, but very
seldom, hardly once a month, by a revolver-
shot, short and sharp, the automatic reply to
the first sign of revolt.

However, the cells are arranged with an almost
absurd regard to comfort. I was shown one of
these cells. I caught sight of a prisoner (who
suddenly rose like a flash of lightning and saluted
the warder), a bed, a washing-stand with running
water and the latest model in sanitary arrange-
ments. The Indian who, when he is free to do
as he likes, sleeps on the hard earth, never washes
himself and does not know what decency means,
cannot care much for these luxuries. But perhaps
the prison authorities think that the fact of being
obliged to be clean makes the punishment seem
all the harder to a race which is naturally very
dirty.

It must be so in the case of the daily tub
which each prisoner is obliged to undergo in a

242

Mexico

special room. The red-capped convict gets no
other exercise ; he has to walk quickly, for a
warder, with lifted cudgel, makes him run down
the passage at a good sharp trot. He goes into
the bathroom and the door is bolted behind him.
I stood on the top of the look-out which is erected
in the middle of this bathroom and watched
many prisoners undress and jump into the bath.
High walls prevent them seeing one another.
That is the idea of solitary confinement. Never
do the unfortunate creatures see the faces of their
neighbours by whose side they live day and night.
They hear one another do the same things at the
exact same hour as they are doing them them-
selves ; but they will never see their brothers
in misery who are separated from them by those
impenetrable partitions.

No wonder all those men looked haggard and
fearfully sad. I was told some of their names.
A young man, who looked like a student, had
just put on his clothes again and placed the hideous
red cap on his head ; he was striding up and
down the yard in order to warm himself ; it seems
that he was once a clerk in a bank and that he
had forged money to the tune of half a million.

243

The Fair Land of Central America

He had got eleven years. Another, who was
scarcely any older but who looked sadder and
more thoroughly cowed, killed one of his friends
in a fashionable Mexican bar. He had been
condemned to death and the sentence com-
muted to twenty years' penal servitude. In the
next courtyard walked an old man with red
eyes. He made me think of Baudelaire's lines :

"... Those eyes are wells made of millions of tears."

He was once a colonel in the army. During a
quarrel with his wife he killed his two little children
in a fit of mad passion. He had got twenty years,
but he won't last as long. And there was also
the typical footpad who had committed eleven
murders. One could see that he belonged to the
lower classes. His neck was as thick as a bull's.
He had been condemned to death. They were
waiting to send five bullets into his hide until
the President had rejected his petition for pardon.
And in the meantime, he, like all the others,
was made to take his daily tub. Educated men
or common thieves — one system soon makes
them all alike ; it is called the system of endless
silence in endless solitude ; they soon lose their

244

Mexico

individuality. They all resembled the hunted,
terrified, half-maddened beasts which one sees
in menageries and which the lion-tamer, with
his long iron crow-bar, chases from cage to cage
until he makes them obey his commands. Have
we the right to keep wild beasts in cages ? It
were better to kill them or to banish them to
some desert land. But is it right to torture
them ?

They are not tortured in the other Mexican
prison, the old Frisian General.

That old prison must be awfully dirty ! I
say " it must be/' for I did not go inside. Not-
withstanding all my splendid letters of intro-
duction, I was only allowed to walk on the roof,
that is to say, on the terrace from which one can
look down into the inner courtyards.

These courtyards are like empty cisterns ;
they are very deep and much too small to con-
tain the five thousand prisoners who swarm
there so thickly that every paving-stone seems
occupied by a crouching figure.

I saw no uniforms in that prison ; the Indian
keeps his rags, his huge pointed hat and his heavy

245

The Fair Land of Central America

red blanket thrown like a shawl over his shoulders.
And all are treated alike : the accused live side
by side with the condemned ! Beggars under-
going a week's imprisonment for drunkenness
elbow dangerous murderers who are " doing "
their twenty years. As the latter are the " elders "
of the prison they are given cudgels and told to
maintain order among the other prisoners. The
women and the political prisoners have special
courtyards. I asked where the dormitories were :
there were none. The prisoners sleep on the pave-
ment. Only the well-to-do are allowed to bring
their mattresses with them. I did not dare to
inquire into the sanitary arrangements : they
would have laughed in my face.

And yet all these prisoners looked perfectly
happy. When they caught sight of me leaning
over the edge of the roof, they all looked up ;
they seemed inquisitive, almost merry, and cer-
tainly less sad than the Indians whom one sees
wandering up and down the streets hunting
for their daily bread.

What do they care for vermin and dirt,
badly ventilated cells and the horrible food ?
They are accustomed to it from their birth.

246

Mexico

In fact, if some charitable individual would
promise to supply them with a daily allowance
of pulque— from three to seven pints— I really
believe not one of these fellows would want to
leave !

The women's courtyard is even more cheerful.
I saw the female prisoners gossiping round
a pump. They welcomed my appearance on
the top of their wall with loud laughter. Two
or three — I don't say it out of conceit ! — kissed
their hands at me and held out their arms. If
it had not been for their rags, dirty petticoats
and native ugliness, I might have imagined
myself in an Eastern harem.

Evidently these people are not afraid of the
old prison. What a difference between the old
system and the model Penitenciaria ! Science
and civilization have turned the harmless pur-
gatory into a cruel hell.

The first was too pleasant, did not frighten
the people enough. Will the new prison intimi-
date would-be criminals ? I doubt it. No one
can realize the horror of solitary confinement,
the fearful loneliness of absolute solitude. One
has to try it before one can realize it. Peni-

247

The Fair Land of Central America

tentiary settlements, banishment to an unculti-
vated country, with less actual cruelty, would
make much more impression upon the minds
of future criminals. So, as we no longer believe
in free-will and the old doctrine of expiation,
ought we not to prefer the old-fashioned refor-
matory to our modern system of solitary confine-
ment ?

Mexico is not the only country in the New
World which can boast of having known civiliza-
tion before the advent of Christopher Columbus.
The Mayas of Central America and the Incas
of Peru can hold their own with the Aztecs of
Mexico in this matter.

But the Aztec domination alone left any very
valuable traces and fairly authentic records.
The history of Mexico goes far back into the
dark ages.

If you want to know more about it, you must
go and read at the municipal libraries. I can tell
you what remains of the old capital of Monte-
zuma now buried under President Porfirio Diaz'
capital. There is not much ; about one hundred
carved stones and that is all I History tells

248

Mexico

us that Cortez razed the Indian town to the
ground. Historians, however, observe that he
respected the old plans when he built his Spanish
capital. That is strange, because the Aztec
capital was built in the middle of a lake and its
streets were canals. Cortez would have found
it a difficult matter to build houses on the surface
of the lake.

So, although the lake is now drained and
the canals have been dry for many a long day,
one can still see traces of the Aztec city in the
modern town. The enormous idols from the famous
Temple of the God of War were used as bases
for the Cathedral pillars ; and the same rock
on which the Palace of Montezuma once stood
— more magnificent than the palaces of the King
of Spain ! said Cortez — now supports the palace
of the President of the Republic.

As the Mexico of the Aztecs was built in the
middle of a lake, we may presume that the in-
habitants went about in gondolas. Here its
resemblance with Venice ceases. It did not live
by commerce, but by cruel slavery ; for the
Aztecs, during long centuries of warfare, bartered
and sold their vanquished enemies ; it was the

249

The Fair Land of Central America

Rome of America. When Cortez appeared upon
the scene, Mexico was nearly as powerful as
Rome, the mistress of Italy, after the Punic
Wars, and it contained three hundred thousand
inhabitants. Mexico was a surprise to the Spanish
soldiers, for no European capital at that time
possessed such a huge population ; it must
have seemed to them the biggest town in the
world.

The Spaniards, notwithstanding their fire-arms,
their steel armour and their great horses which
struck terror in the superstitious Aztecs' hearts,
would never have been able to take Mexico.
Cortez showed his cleverness by making use
of a certain stratagem which, several centuries
before, had made the Rome of the Old World
tremble many a time for its safety : he gathered
all the vanquished tribes together and led them
against the Rome of the New World. It was
not a few hundred Spaniards, but six hundred
thousand Indians who subdued that proud city.

No historian, as far as I am aware, has ever
observed the resemblance between Aztec and
Roman civilization. And yet anyone who takes
an interest in the history of our different religions

250

Mexico

would find it worth his attention. We '.know
what an important part sacrifices to the gods
played during the Punic Wars, and how priests
used to predict future events by examining the
victims* entrails. Is it not strange to learn
that on a continent whose existence nobody in
the Old World ever suspected, and which itself
was totally unaware of any other continents,
the same warlike habits and customs led to the
same rites, with this difference only, that, as
the Aztec priests had no big animals to sacrifice
to their gods, they continued to sacrifice human
victims.

What shall we say except that martial nations
are usually very superstitious ? The Chinese
are the most peaceable creatures on the face of
the earth. Their religion has been humanized to
such a degree that it is nothing more than moral
philosophy. In the case of the Crusaders and the
Mahometans we see that, when the religious
instinct flows upon the smouldering embers of
the combative instinct, the latter becomes a
species of madness. These two instincts are
brothers and inseparable. Show me one fanatical
religion which has managed to live at peace

251

The Fair Land of Central America

with its neighbours ! The god of the Aztecs was
just as powerless as any other heathen god to
bring peace on earth and good-will to all man-
kind.

If the history of Old Mexico teaches us that
fact, it will not have been altogether useless.
But we must not expect it to teach us anything
else. The two or three dozen stone idols contained
in the National Museum in Mexico prove that the
race had no idea of aesthetics and cared nothing
for beauty. Although they may have been the
Romans of America, the Aztecs were certainly
no Hellenes. It was not their fault. The physique
of the Indians, whom one sees walking in the
streets of modern Mexico, is and always has
been calculated to discourage sculptors and
painters.

The nation was religious and brave. That is
understood. But the race is so ugly and dirty,
that it is difficult to think of it as being poetical
in any way ; it will have to wait a long time
for its Salammbo and its Quo Vadis.

The capital of Mexico is peopled with Mexicans
— at least, so I believe ; but really at first sight

252

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Mexico

one might doubt that fact. In the twelve or
fifteen streets which contain shops with any
pretensions to smartness, I tried in vain to find a
Mexican shop. The milliners' shops are kept by
Frenchwomen ; the grocers' shops belong to
Spaniards ; the chemists are all Germans and the
banks are run by Americans.

In the fashionable West End — who can ex-
plain why all towns seem inclined to spread from
east to west ? — where we find the most beautiful
and luxurious houses, I noticed that nearly all
the proprietors were French or Yankee. In fact,
there are about twenty thousand foreigners among
the four hundred thousand inhabitants of Mexico ;
but the foreigners are the only ones who work and
earn any money. The genuine Indian, who con-
stitutes the greater part of the population, stupe-
fied by alcohol and superstition, is scarcely better
than a domestic animal. As to the real Mexicans,
that is to say, the descendants of Spaniards and
Indians, who call themselves gentes de razon,1 they
all occupy official, clerical, military or civil posi-
tions. Those who go in for trade seldom rise
above the rank of employes.

1 Gentes de razon : men of judgment.
253

The Fair Land of Central America

People who talk of Mexico's wonderful progress
under the presidency of Porfirio Diaz, whose
glorious reign is still continuing, should learn the
following facts. This excellent despot has been
able to establish order in his country's adminis-
tration and security all over his dominions.
But he has not been able to make his compatriots
fond of work. The foreigner alone benefits by
the present state of agricultural, commercial and
industrial prosperity ; and although the foreigners'
success benefits the country indirectly, that fact
does not prevent Mexico from owing all her
good fortune to the work of people who are not
Mexicans.

The psychology of the latter makes an interest-
ing study !

They come from all corners of the globe ex-
cept from the other Spanish-American republics.
For it is a remarkable fact that the seventeen
Latin American republics — am I right ? I am
always afraid of forgetting some of them ! — hold
no material or intellectual intercourse with one
another. They are too much alike. They have
nothing to give or to take from one another,
and so they think that they have nothing to

254

Mexico

learn. The eyes of one and all are turned to-
wards the United States or towards Europe ; no
one deigns to take a peep at what his neighbour
is about. Many an inhabitant of Buenos Ayres,
who pays an annual visit to New York or to
Paris, never dreams of going to Rio de Janeiro
which is only round the corner, so to speak.
People travel so little out there, that no one
thinks of improving the means of communi-
cation. During my stay in Mexico, I met a Peru-
vian lady who, in order to get from her native
land to Mexico, had been obliged to go up to
New York ! And while in Havana, I met an
Argentine who had just arrived from the West
Indies via London ! The Brazilian Minister in
Mexico told his friends at the club the other day
that he had just experienced the greatest surprise
which he had had since his arrival in Mexico
ten years ago : a Brazilian had just arrived on a
visit to some Mexican friends !

The American States* absolute indifference to
one another will ruin any attempt at Pan-Iberian-
ism, which Latin America might otherwise have
found a powerful weapon against the masses of
Anglo-Saxons from the United States. The

255

The Fair Land of Central America

Yankee, in his gradual but uninterrupted descent
towards the South, will only find a cloud of dust
to resist him.

Let us now go back to Mexico. With the ex-
ception of the Spanish - Americans, all nations
are represented there. But three nations carry
off the palm for numbers and for the industry
of their representatives ; those countries are the
United States, Spain and France.

The French are the least numerous. There are
about two thousand in the capital itself and about
the same number in the provinces. But they have
made the biggest fortunes by monopolizing the
nouveautes trade and by building shops nearly
as huge as the Louvre and the Bon Marche. These
good folk, mostly natives of Dauphiny, start with
a few francs, and earn big fortunes by a very simple
process which consists of selling for five piastres
in Mexico articles which cost five francs in Paris ;
they have no wish to meddle with politics. Their
Mexican customers, who are inclined to consider
them more as grasping money-grubbers than as
benefactors to mankind, don't trouble themselves
much about them, for they know that the French
never remain long in a foreign land, and that

256

Mexico

they are sure to return to France sooner or
later.

French banks have, of late, begun to take an
interest in Mexican affairs ; as they have lent
considerable sums of money to the Mexican
Government, they are entitled to have a voice in
political matters ; that voice may seem of little
consequence, but it will be sufficiently powerful
to turn the scales for or against the United States.
For the United States alone threaten to monopo-
lize Mexico's riches. The Spanish colony is divided
into the humble folk, who sell groceries and keep
pawnbrokers' shops, and the great lords who
exploit huge haciendas. The natives are oppressed
by both ; but the Government still keeps them in
order, and is quite capable of giving them a good
lesson if they go too far.

It is quite different with the citizens of the
powerful neighbouring republic ! First, they
attack the vital organs of Mexico's prosperity,
that is to say, its mines and railroads. Although
they are not such hard taskmasters as the Spanish
haciendado, the natives find the yoke more galling,
for the word of command or blame is given in
R 257

The Fair Land of Central America

another language. The Yankee does not even
try to speak the language of the country. I
met several men who had been there for ten
years and who were quite incapable of asking
for what they wanted to eat or drink in
Spanish !

This inability or unwillingness to learn a foreign
tongue, together with their own very different
customs and code of morals, isolate them still
more. They live quite apart from the Mexicans —
and not, like the French, for a short time, but
for good and all ; for they seem to find Mexico
such a very nice place in which to live that
they apparently have no intention of leaving
it.

Of all the foreign diplomatists, their representa-
tive alone enjoys the title of ambassador, which
title gives him precedence over his colleagues.
This ambassador has the right to speak his mind
for three reasons ; first, because he represents
the stronger party ; then people say that he is a
splendid fellow — in Yankee diplomatic circles
Mexico is considered the most important post
after London ; and, finally, he began life as a
Pullman Car employe, which fact is entirely to

258

Mexico

his credit, but which does not teach one how to
wear a dress-coat.

There are certain Ministers, like the French
Minister, for instance, who only fear one thing,
and that is that people will think them too zealous.
American ambassadors do not figure in that crew.
One of the secretaries at the United States
Legation was lately requested to go to his chief's
bureau. The ambassador looked up from his
papers, stared at the young man, and said shortly :

" Sir ! you have not been to the office in the
afternoon for several weeks. I have calculated
that you have defrauded our Government of so
many hours' work by your laziness. Here is my
calculation. I shall trouble you to come to the
office every evening from nine o'clock to midnight
until you have made up for lost time ! "

How can we expect old Europe to resist these
lunatics who think that everybody, including
diplomatists, ought to work in their country ?

From the tourist's point of view, Mexico,
situated on its elevated table-land, is of minor
interest. A globe-trotter, who knew it well,
said to me, in speaking of it :

259

The Fair Land of Central America

"It is Gaul before the time of Julius
Caesar ! "

But we find novel and beautiful scenery at the
two ends of the huge republic, for to the south-
east is the Atlantic peninsula of Yucatan, and
in the north-west we find, on the Pacific coast,
the deserts of the Sonora.

In Yucatan stand the famous ruins of Palenque,
a heap of temples and palaces, the most important
remains of American civilization before Chris-
topher Columbus. The tropical vegetation has
grown round the ruins. Walls covered with
wonderfully delicate carvings are half hidden
under the green velvety grass and the grey lace-
work of tree-roots. In place of the ruined ceilings,
a colonnade of trees one hundred feet high
supports a dome of leafy branches impervious
to the sun, where the chattering of monkeys
and parrots replaces the echo of human voices
long since hushed to rest. Nothing is more striking
than the sight of a whole town slowly falling into
ruins. It is as if Fate were tearing another page
of human history from the book of the world.

I felt that I must go and see those ruins, and I
wanted to start off at once. One can afford to

260

Mexico

devote a fortnight's leisure in order to realize
what the world was like fifteen hundred years
ago ! But an official who had spent eight months
in those climes stopped me.

" You foolish fellow ! Do you know what you
will have to face when you get there ? The heat
in Yucatan is awful."

" I can stand it ; I stood Panama/'

" There are no hotels out there."

" I will lodge in a hut."

" The old walls, which you are so anxious to see,
are infested with tarantulas, huge spiders which
look very much like pieces of black velvet ; their
bite is poisonous."

" I'll look out for myself ! "

" When you lie down at night, you will be
obliged to throw off all your clothes on account
of the heat, and then you will feel a cold, clammy
serpent creeping over your body. The owners
of the hut would be very angry if you were to
kill that serpent. He is the household cat. He
sleeps all day in the roof, and awakes every night
to catch rats 1 "

" I won't hurt him."

" When the rats feel the serpent biting their

261

The Fair Land of Central America

hind-legs, they make enough noise to wake
the dead."

" I'll stuff my ears with cotton-wool."

" The mosquitoes are terrible ! "

" I'll take a mosquito-net."

" You don't understand me. There are day-
mosquitoes and night-mosquitoes ; when one
batch goes off duty, the other begins operations.
Woe betide you if they catch you napping and
unprepared for battle ! You'll be covered with
bites, and you will swell up in the most horrible

manner."

' The deuce ! '

" And then a special kind of fly will lay
its larva in your flesh ; this larva is a sort
of hairy worm, which causes intense suffering
when it begins to grow. The sore has to be
cut open and the worm pulled out hair by hair ;
and then the wound is cauterized with tobacco-
juice."

" The deuce ! the deuce ! "

" And then there are always numerous cases of
yellow fever during the rainy season. The inhabi-
tants are almost invulnerable, but the new-
comers never escape ..."

262

Mexico

" That's enough ! Those ruins will have to do
without me ! "

As the South would have none of me, I turned
northward, and made up my mind to go and in-
spect the mining district of the deserted Sonora.
There are no mosquitoes there, no hairy cater-
pillars, no yellow fever. You " hitch up " with
some prospector, on the look-out for a gold or a
silver placer mine, and then you start off in quest
of adventures. And what nice adventures they
are ! You may expect to meet with three fellow-
travellers : the bear of the Rocky Mountains,
the frontier Indian and the white footpad. Such
meetings afford much pleasure to both parties.

The bear of the Rocky Mountains has nothing
in common, except his name, with his good old
cousins in the Alps, the Pyrenees and Russia.
He stands seven feet high, and charges his adver-
sary with the rapidity of a race-horse. His hide,
which is as hard and as tough as steel, is bullet-
proof. His paws are armed with long razor-like
claws which tear off your head before you know
where you are.

The frontier Indian a few years ago was repre-
sented by the Apaches, now nearly exterminated.

263

The Fair Land of Central America

The Yaqui, once a friendly tribe but now the
bitter enemy of the white man who has stolen
all his territory, has now taken the place of the
Apache. Whenever a white man falls into the
hands of the Yaquis, they torture him and put
him to death in the most horrible manner. . . .
The Apache spares the lives of children under
seven years that he may make slaves of them.
But woe betide them if they try to escape !

But the white man who roams over the sierras
on the look-out for prey in the shape of a lonely
miner, is more implacable than the bear and more
inevitable than the Apache or the Yaqui. He is
usually an old prospector who is down on his luck,
or who has killed his man in a fit of passion
or on a spree, and has been outlawed in conse-
quence. He knows that he will be lynched if he
is caught, so he has pity on no one.

" The tragedy which forces an adventurer to
become an outlaw/* said a friend to me, " is
usually short and sharp. I witnessed a scene of
this kind in a saloon which an American had built
near a well-known placer mine. Here the miners
used to have their meals, served by this American's
daughter. One day one of these miners, a rough,

264

Mexico

red-haired brute, scolded the girl for giving him
food which, he declared, was not fit to eat. The
sort of American girl whom one meets out there
is not gifted with much patience. She simply
flung the food in his face. The customer said
nothing, wiped his face and went out to look for
his revolver, which he had left in his cabin. He re-
turned an hour later, found the saloon-keeper doing
chores in his barn and shot him dead. They did
not give him time to escape. He was immediately
caught, bound and tried ; by tried, I mean that
three of the miners took their seats on a sort of
platform and requested the assembled crowd to
say if they considered that the culprit deserved
death. They all cried with one accord, ' Yes ! '
A rope was fastened to a branch, and the man was
hung — but that was not all ! The curious part of
the story was that before they hung him, when he
was already standing pale and speechless under
the tree, they asked him if he had any message
to send to his people. Whereupon he called out,
' Jim ! ' Jim was among the crowd. Jim was told
to step forward, which he did, and came and stood
close to his pal. But neither of them said a word.
At last Jim roughly passed his hand over the

265

The Fair Land of Central Amercia

condemned man's chin, and said, ' Say, old friend !
you didn't shave this morning ; the rope won't
run easy ! ' The condemned man chuckled ; I
can still hear him. Not another word did they
say. A minute later his body was swinging to
and fro in the wind. One of the miners, who had
managed the whole affair, stepped forward, crying,
' Let this be a lesson ! There are ten rowdy chaps
here whom I should advise to leave the country
if they don't want us to make them a similar
present of rope-end ! ' In short, some of the rowdy
fellows (whom I hope you may never meet if
you ever happen to be alone at night near a deep
pool) left the mining-camp that very evening."

" I shall not have the pleasure of making their
acquaintance," I replied. " I shall see neither
them nor your big bears nor your Indian torturers !
I can see that the Sonora is even a more uncom-
fortable place to travel in than Yucatan. Where
can one find peace from mosquitoes and thieves
in Mexico ? "

" In the Central States ! The climate is mild
and the people peaceable. You might think
yourself in Europe."

" Oh ! I know what I will do, then. I'll go

266

M

exico

back to Europe. I can then imagine myself in
your Central States. It will be infinitely cheaper
and more pleasant/1

That is why Mexico is not, and is scarcely likely
ever to be, a happy hunting-ground for Thomas
Cook and his kind.

267

EPILOGUE

A disciple of Ernest Renan — East or West, home is best — A view
of the Amazon — The charm of the Parisienne — Una Madame —
The Sorbonne and the Moulin Rouge — On calling a spade a
spade — A dishonest hotel-keeper and an ill-bred journalist —
The Yankee tide beating against the Mexican embankment —
Paris eclipsed by New York.

ERNEST RENAN, the Breton seminarist who
studied for ten or fifteen years before he was able to
convince himself that the Bible is full of romantic
situations such as all modern novels contain,
confessed that he felt rather small at the thought
that he had had to learn Latin, Greek and Hebrew,
read all the doctors of divinity and wrestle with
his conscience before he became imbued with that
scepticism which flourishes in every corner in
Paris and which every street-arab professes from
his cradle.

I felt equally small on landing in Europe after
my trip to America. I had had to wander up and

268

Epilogue

down for six long months, change boats seven
times, learn Spanish, live with niggers, mosquitoes
and inn-keepers, ruin my digestion by sampling
twenty kinds of cookery, and worry two or three
hundred men before I could arrive at this fact,
that America, as far as picturesque scenery goes,
cannot be compared with Europe. Neither the
luxuriant forests of Costa Rica, nor the orchid
avenues of Jamaica, nor the snowy peaks of
Popocatepetl, can be compared, for instance,
with that little valley on the banks of the Loire
along which the train, which brought me from
Saint Nazaire to Paris, meandered. Our dear old
tourist-ridden Europe is still the prettiest land
under the sun. The " stay-at-home Frenchman/'
who does not need to take a six months' detour
in the tropics in order to discover the beauty
and poetry of the banks of the Loire, is quite
right.

Yes, but Ernest Renan had at least one superi-
ority over the Parisian street-arab, for he knew the
reason of his incredulity. He knew that his
scepticism was incurable, that nothing could take
it away from him, and therefore he felt a

269

The Fair Land of Central America

secret pleasure which the street-arab can never
experience.

I myself experienced this feeling while seated
in the train which brought me from my trans-
atlantic boat to Paris. I realized the beauty of a
French sky and the charm of European scenery
far better than the stay-at-home, who has never
left the temperate zone, can do.

Tropical sunshine is beautiful but monotonous.
There are no seasons. It is always summer.
The harsh, glaring vegetation knows nothing of
the tender fresh green of young leaves in spring,
nor the glorious tragedy of death enacted by our
trees in autumn. While there, I asked an artist,
who had just returned from a trip up the Amazon,
the most beautiful river in America, to describe
the scenery to me. In reply, he went and fetched
a canvas which looked like a tricolour flag ; it
was painted in three strips of colour : one brown,
one green and one blue.

" The brown strip," said he, " represents the
waters of the Amazon ; the green is the forest
along its banks ; the blue is the sky. I steamed
up the Amazon for three weeks and I never saw
anything else."

270

Epilogue

He was probably suffering from a severe attack
of disappointment ! But it is quite true that,
in that dry, scorching atmosphere, we miss the
delicate tones of our European sky with its horizon
veiled in silvery mist. Tropical Nature is as coarse
and hideous as a naked negress. Our more modest
Nature has taught us to appreciate the charm
of veils and gauzes. That charm haunts us.

Seated beside me in the train was a Cuban
planter who was going into ecstasies over the
vision outside the carriage-window ; fields
bounded by green hedges, rivulets with their
courses marked by curtains of tall poplars, villages
and farms with blue-slate roofs, and — what is
only seen in the Department of the Loire — any
number of chateaux in all styles of architecture,
from the great mansion of the last century,
low-built and well-lighted, to the turreted manor
with which every hill is crowned.

My Cuban planter exclaimed :

" What wonderful variety of scenery ! In
Cuba you find whole provinces of tobacco-plants
stretching farther than the eye can see. It may
be more practical, but it is not so pretty. Here
all your farmers seem to think about is to blend

271

The Fair Land of Central America

the different tones of their cereals. What artists
they are ! "

I explained to my Cuban friend that the peasants
of Lower Brittany know nothing about such
matters. The culture of lands divided into
small holdings, the regime of the small plot of
land, lead to this happy artistic result. But he
had just remarked another superiority of our
country over his : not only is European scenery
more delicately coloured, but there is more variety
in it.

After the pleasures of sight the European, who
has just returned from a voyage in the tropics,
soon learns to appreciate the pleasures of taste.
At last I was able to eat fruit and vegetables again !
The Southern and Central Americans never give
you anything but meat, ten or fifteen dishes of
beef, mutton and rice ! They are obliged to add
a great deal of pimento and other spices in order
to disguise the monotony of their menu. After a
few months of such a regime, the foreigner feels
that his stomach is going on strike, and that he
must really think seriously about browsing the
grass in the fields if he can't get anything better,
or else an intestinal malady will come to settle

272

Epilogue

matters for him, either by killing him, or by
forcing him to go and get patched up in Europe.
The native is more hardy and can resist. But when
people talk of Latin America, of her quarrelsome
despots and her dissolute morals, they would do
well to remember this detail of psycho-physiology.
The fact that the poor fellows* blood is over-
heated accounts for a good deal.

Most Americans refuse to admit Europe's
superiority over the tropics, as regards scenery
and the art of cooking. They prefer the scenery
and the cookery to which they have been accus-
tomed since their cradle. And it is quite natural
that they should do so. To tell the truth, the
only place they care for in Europe is Paris ;
and Paris, I think, is represented to them by the
Parisienne.

In the New World, the Parisienne enjoys extra-
ordinary popularity, and this fame she owes partly
to dressmakers and partly to novelists. No
goddess in the old days ever had as many wor-
shippers as she has. Her charming shadow haunts
the Central American in all his dreams of bliss.
No miraculous statue of the Virgin ever attracted
s 273

The Fair Land of Central America

such crowds of pilgrims as now flock to see
the Parisienne from every corner of the
world.

I will not vouch for the fact that this beauty-
worship is not an excuse for satisfying low tastes.
Great popular upheavals are like great floods ; they
carry a terrible amount of mud wherever they go.
Talking of hypocrisy, I am glad to be able for once
to contradict certain sanctimonious humbugs with
their everlasting :

" Oh ! yes, my dear fellow ! French litera-
ture ... If the French only knew what harm
their literature does them abroad ! "

An extremely clever and original author,
M. Hugues Le Roux, on his return from a trip
to the United States, turned the tables on his
foreign friends by proposing that we, in the
interests of France, should start a league against
indecent foreign literature !

Heaven forbid that I should champion the
cause of this obnoxious form of literature ! But
M. Hugues Le Roux is mistaken as to the interests
of France. It is quite true that the modern
French novel and the modern fashionable heroine
with her faults and failings sometimes cause

274

Epilogue

my female compatriots considerable annoyance
when travelling in foreign lands. When the Cuban
wishes to describe a woman of easy virtue, he
calls her una madame. Now madame, in Spanish,
means a cocotte. French ladies coming to settle
for a time in Cuba are warned not to allow their
servants to call them anything but Senora, as
the French term madame is impertinent.

And yet, what do we see out there ? The shops
in the Calle Obispo, Havana's most fashionable
thoroughfare, all call themselves French and
pretend to sell Parisian goods. One would think
they were so many temples erected in honour of
the Parisienne. We see the same thing in Mexico,
in the magnificent Calle San Francisco, in the
streets of the other big South American towns,
and, let us say, in the streets of all the capitals
in the world.

Paris is Aphrodite up-to-date. The whole
world comes to worship at her shrine. Now, do
you think that this would happen if she were only
represented by a set of grave priests or refined
art-lovers ? And so we are bound to confess
that her coarse literature is a good advertisement,
and, alas ! its effects are far-reaching.

275

The Fair Land of Central America

No doubt it is more flattering to one's vanity
to live in the town of Minerva than in the city
of Aphrodite. But one leads to the other. The
Central Americans firmly believe that the road
to the Sorbonne lies through the Moulin
Rouge.

The interests of France are centred round her
capital. Her commerce, arts and sciences are
well known all over the world ; they make her
fame glow like an illuminated sign. We must not
be too particular as to the quality of the oil which
feeds the beacon of such a powerful lighthouse.

Certain newspapers in Mexico and the Antilles
did me the honour to reproduce some extracts
from this book, which had already appeared in
European newspapers ; in most cases, they spoke
very favourably of my efforts, for which I thank
them.

However, one Costa Rican newspaper discharged
a perfect volley of abuse at my head ; the fact is
not worth mentioning except that this outburst
of temper furnishes rather an amusing epilogue
to the psychology of the little republics of Central
America.

276

Epilogue

I gave rather a favourable report of Costa Rica
on the whole; in fact, I went so far as to say:
" At the end of three days, I felt as if I could
spend the rest of my life quite happily there."
That was somewhat exaggerated. But what could
I do ? I had been received so kindly, I had made
such charming and distinguished friends that I
saw this little American Switzerland under very
favourable circumstances, and I felt really grieved
to think that she must soon fall into the hands
of the United States. I spoke of the " Costa
Rican's sweet, sunny disposition and of his
companion's strange charm." In fact, I was
quite enthusiastic.

Well, my book was translated into Spanish ;
it seems that I said all sorts of awful things about
Costa Rica and its inhabitants.

Traduttore, tmditore. The Spanish translator
must have made me say in Spanish what I never
said in French. The Spanish tongue is not
calculated to reproduce the lights and shades of
our French language. But that was not enough.
I must have miscalculated the depth of civilization
in Costa Rica, for they don't seem to be able to
appreciate irony. These young nations are still

277

The Fair Land of Central America

rather like savages. They can only perceive vivid
colours.

This little incident proves that these Central
American republics are unfamiliar with the im-
partial visitor. They only understand diploma-
tists whose business it is to purr prettily no matter
what happens, and business-men who know that
silence is gold. I firmly believe that I was the first
European writer to visit those little - known
countries in order to describe things as they really
are, study the race problem, and prognosticate
the future of the two Americas.

The Costa Rican behaves like a monkey who
sees a looking-glass for the first time. It puts out
its tongue, and then suddenly flies into a temper
and smashes the offending mirror into a thousand
pieces. The Republica, the most important news-
paper in their village, informed its readers that I
hated Costa Rica. In those countries one is
either friend or foe. When a man ceases to flatter
you, you may know that he is preparing to
bite.

What caused this outburst of satanical hatred
on my part ? My dislike of a certain inn, where,

278

Epilogue

if you leave valuables lying about in your room,
they disappear as if by magic. Theft is the Costa
Rican's besetting sin. They were much astonished
that I should complain, and that I should trouble
the police for such a trifling matter. It would be
a brave person who would want to pay a second
visit to that hotel ; it was so dirty that a dog would
have refused to live there.

The Republica, the most important newspaper
in the village, at last discovered the reason of my
dislike : it was all the fault of the Palace Hotel.
Without that unlucky incident, I should never
have thought of describing Costa Rica as anything
but a paradise inhabited by angels. After that,
everyone went back to their old occupation,
which consists of bestowing fulsome flattery upon
one another.

No, I am not so mean. Neither dishonest hotel-
keeper nor ill-bred journalist could spoil the
pleasant memory of Costa Rica, its splendid
forests, its pretty women and the few distinguished
and witty men who kindly did the honours of
their little Fatherland. But, alas ! all my liking

279

The Fair Land of Central America

for them cannot prevent me hearing the step of
the approaching Yankee.

It was the same thing in Mexico. I fear that I
spoke even more bitterly of Mexico than of Costa
Rica, because I expected better things of her.
I belong to the Latin race which refuses to die.
When I realized that civilization in Central
America was unlikely to reach a very high
standard of perfection, I turned towards great
Mexico as towards the farthest outworks of Latin
civilization and also, I must confess, of European
commerce.

I was grieved to find her so defenceless. I came
away with the impression that she owed her
prosperity to the industry of her foreign colony.
Out of fourteen million Mexicans, there are twelve
million Indians who do not count, so stupefied
are they by drink and superstition. The two re-
maining millions, notwithstanding their great love
for their country, cannot be compared in the
matter of vim and energy with two million
Yankees taken from whichever State you like
to choose ; and there are eighty million
" hustling " Yankees on the other side of the

280

Epilogue

frontier. The embankment is bound to fall in
sooner or later. Although the clean-shaven
Yankee, with his great thick boots and his gold-
filled teeth, may pretend to keep his fingers out of
the political pie, in the north as in the south he
intends to realize his ambition, which is probably
of a higher standard than that of Spain and not
inferior to that of France ; and when he has got
what he wants, he will cease to trade with Europe,
and will push the old mother on one side as if
she were a stranger.

When once the Mexican embankment is broken
down, the Yankee tide will flow along at its own
sweet will. It will engulf Venezuela, Colombia,
Ecuador and Peru, only to pause before the three
important States of South America : Brazil,
Argentina and Chili. The latter, they say, are
made of better stuff. But the wave, which will
then beat against their ramparts, will have
become as formidable as a tidal wave ; and it is
doubtful whether these countries will be able
to do anything but just stop its progress for a
short time.

In those days— and many of us who are now

281

The Fair Land of Central America

young men will see it — the United States will be
more powerful than the whole of Europe put
together. Rome will be situated in the New
World, and Paris will be nothing but an Athens
which is beginning to fade away into the grey
mists and shadows of the Past.

282

Index

Actualidades., theatre of, 182

Adam, Paul, 169

Alps, the, 167, 263

Amazon, River, 270

American Navy, 197

Amphictyon, Council of, 119

Amphitrite, 123

Andes, the, 60

d'Annunzio, Gabriele, 203-204

Antilles, 18, 20, 22, 31-54, 276

Antilles, French, 45-47, 49

Antwerp, 118

Apaches, or Yaquis, 263-264

Apocalypse, 105

Arab customs, 228

Ardennes, 131

Argentine Republic, 15, 58,

255, 281

Aspinwall, see Colon
Assour, King of, 223
Assyrians, the, 223
Athens, 282
Atlantic, 135, 151
Augustus, 233
Automobile Club of Mexico,

218

Avellane, Admiral, 196
Azores, coast of the, 20
Azores, Islands of, 25, 29
Aztecs, 210, 223-224, 229, 248

B

Balboa, Nunez de, 65-66, 104
Bananas, 92, 130, 156, 166

Barbadoes, 35-37, 38, 40-43

Barcelona, 213

Barrios, Ruffino, 143, 147-148

Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 244

Bears, 263

Beatrice and Dante, 175

Belgium, 55, 86, 161, 226

Birds, 128

Bishop of Panama, 98-101

Bogota, 55, 57, 81,86,99, 201,

203

Bois de Boulogne, 45
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 84, 147
Bon Marche, 45, 256
Bordeaux, 118

Bourgogne^ wreck of the, 26-27
Brazil, 15, 281
Breton Par dons , 208
Brittany, 131, 214
Buenos Ayres, 14, 60, 79, 196,

234, 255
Bull-fights, 227, 234

Cabrera, Estrada, 141, 145-147

Californian wines, 14

Calle Obispo, Havana, 176, 180,

275
Calle de San Francisco, Mexico,

239* 275

Calle San Isidor, Havana, 182
Canada, 117, 154
Cape Horn, 108
Capitalists, Yankee, 185, 186,

194

283

Index

Caracas, 42, 51, 53, 61, 86
Caribbean Sea, 36, 164, 180
Carnegie, Andrew, 140
Carrara marble, 149
Carreras, Rafael, 147
Castro, Cipriani, 42, 50-54, 88,

^ 142, 145
Catholics, 204, 215
Caucasus, Mountains, 131
Cemetery at Panama, 114
Cervantes, Miguel, 85
Ceylon, Island of, 126
Chagres, River, 109
Chicago, 14, 132, 179, 227
Chicago storekeepers, 97
Chili, 15, 60, 122, 281
China, 59

Chinese customs, 80
Chinamen, 92, 109, 125, 210,

251

Chocana, Jose, 202
Clergy of Costa Rica, 136
Cock-fighting, 225-226
Coffee plantations, 131
Cologne, 181
Colombia, 57, 60-61, 88, 99,

101, 154, 201-202, 281
Columbus, Christopher, 18, 28-

29, 248, 261
Colon or Aspinwall, 19, 53,

59-61, 112, 121-123
Congo negroes, 36
Congo State, 66, 161
Conquest of Mexico, 209
Cook, Thomas, 267
Corao, Colonel, 51-52
Cordilleras, Mountains, 133
Cortez, Ferdinand, 224, 249-

r, 25°

Costa Rica, 97, 117-161, 163,

168, 198, 269, 277-280
Couscous ', 41
Creoles, 198

Cruelty to animals, 224-228

Crusaders, the, 251

Cuba, 14, 29, 162-204, 167,

223

Custom-house regulations, 19
Czarism, 88

Danaides, the, 109

Dancers, Spanish, 182-184

Dante and Beatrice, 175

Darien, Isthmus of, 154

Dauphiny, 256

Delilah, 179

Diaz, Porfirio, 88-89, 209, 213,

215-216, 233, 248, 254
Dingier1 s Folly r, 82
Don Juan^ 176
Dumas, Alexandre, pere, 200
Dutch boats, 20

E

Ecuador, 88, 281
Eldorado, 234
Elections in Panama, 88-91
Employes Club, Havana, 200
Engineers, American, 110-116
England and her colonies, 35
English business-houses, 155,

161

English steamers, 20, 59

Fireworks in Havana, 193
Florida, coast of, 36
Folies-Bergere, Paris, 134
Forest of Panama, 105
"Forty-one" Club, 232-233
France, 85-86, 103, 161, 226,

256, 276

French ambition, 281
French bankers, 256-257

284

Index

French boats, 20, 59-60
French colonies, 35
French Transatlantic Steam-
ship Co., 51, 205

Gambetta, Leon, 235-237
Gambling in Mexico, 215
Gaul, 260

Geneva, Lake of, 65
Genoa, 118

Germany, 85, 161, 196
German business-men, 155, 253
German transatlantic boats, 59,

163-164

Goethaels, Colonel, 106-107
Goya, Francisco, 182
Greater Antilles, 43
Guatemala, 117, 129, 137, 141,

153, 202, 208
Guerrero, Amador, 75, 89
Guianas, the, 43
Guiana, British, 43
Guinea, negroes of, 36
Gulf Stream, 25, 28-29

H

Hamburg, 14, 118
Hamburg-American Line, 163-

164
Havana, 44, 108, 168-169,

205, 212-213, 234, 275
Havre, 205
Hellenes, 252

Heredia, Jose Maria de, 18
Hernani, 16
Hindus, imported to Trinidad,

37> 46

Hohenzollern family, 163
Honduras, 117, 151, 153, 208
Hong Kong, 44

Hotels in Central America, 157

x67
Hugo, Victor, 200

I

Incas of Peru, 248
Indians, 158, 252, 263
Indians and Columbus, 29
Inquisition, Spanish, 105, 223
Irish nuns, 207
Italy, 6 1
Italian boats, 20, 103

J

Jamaica, 34, 44, 62, 156, 162-

204, 269

Jamaican negroes, 67, 80
Japan, 59

Japanese, the, 107, 109
Japanese Navy, 197
Jewish bankers, 92
Jockey Club, Mexico, 239
Juarez, Benito, 209, 211, 216
Julius Caesar, 260

K
Kingston, earthquake at, 165

La Guayra, 32, 53, 60
Las Bovedas, 69-70
Laveran, Dr., 83
Lazzaroni, Neapolitan, 91
Le Roux, Hugues, 274
Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 112
Lima, 81, 201
Lisbon, 60

Literature, French, 274
Literature, South American,

202-204
Loire, Department of, 271

285

Index

Loire, River, 269

London, 14, 118, 166, 214,

258

Lopez, Manuel, 171-172
Louisiana, coast of, 36
Louvre, Paris, 45, 256
Lusitania, the, 23
Lyons, ribbons, 181

M

Madrid, 60, 213-214
Magdalena, River, 56-57
Magellan, Straits of, 1 1 8
Magoon, Mr., 186
Mahometans, 251
Malaria, 33, 264
Mauretania, the, 23
Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico,

209

Mayas, 248
Mexico, 16, 18, 88, 97, 99,

138-206, 267, 276, 280
Mexico, Gulf of, 36
Mexican cookery, 238-239
Mexican cowboys, 63, 226
Mexican morals, 230
Mexican prisons, 240-248
Michael, St., 216-217
Minerva, 251
Miraflores, 52
Montanet, Dr., 186, 201
Monte Carlo, 179
Montezuma, 224, 248-249
Morocco, 161
Mosquitoes, 33, 48, 60, 167,

262-263

Moulin Rouge, Paris, 276
Mulattoes, 36, 62

N

Naples, 91, 199

Nautilus, the, 190, 192, 196

Navy, American, 197

Nero, 52

Neuchatel, ribbons, 181

New Orleans, 156, 170

New York, 14-15, 17, 19, 59,

80, 108, 132, 163, 166, 179-

180, 227, 255
Niagara, 123

Nicaragua, 117, 140-143. *53
Nineveh, 223

O

Ohnet, Georges, 200
Opera-Comique, Paris, 101
Orinoco, the, 42-43
Orinoco, River, 34, 44
Orizaba, 208, 214, 217
Ovid, 233

Pacific Mail Company, 164
Pacific Ocean, shores of, 79,

133

Pages, Father, 147-148
Paillard, 236

Palenque, ruins of, 260-263
Pan-Iberianism, 255
Panama Canal and town, 14,

16-17, 19. 37» 53, S?-11^
Paris, 15, 17, 159, 196, 214,

255, 268, 269, 273, 282
Paris fashions, 63, 150, 180,

275

Pascal, Blaise, 227
Perugino, Pietro Vanucci, 151
Petronius' Satyricon, 22
Peru, 60, 201-202, 281
Pharaohs, 109
Philistines, 179
Pius X, 129

Polytechnic School, 145-146
Popocatepetl, 269

286

Index

Prado, Havana, 176, 178-179
Priests, Spanish-American, 206,

210-212

Prinz August Wilhelm, the, 164
Provencal shopkeepers, 209
Puerto-Columbia, 56, 58
Pulque, 213, 247
Punic Wars, 250-251
Pyrenees, Mountains, 263

Queen's Park, Trinidad, 50
Quo Vadis, 252

Reclus, Elis6e, 36

Red Indians, 208

Renan, Ernest, 268-269

JRepublica, the, 278-279

Reyes, Bernardo, 88

Rio, 14, 234

Rio de Janeiro, 60, 255

Robinson Crusoe, 22

Rocky Mountains, 263

Rome, 250, 282

Roosevelt, Theodore, 77-78,

99-100, 184-185, 222
Rothschild, Baronne de, 236-

237

Russia, 85, 196, 263
Russian dancer, 205-206

Saint-Cyr military school, 140
Saint-Louis, 169, 227
Saint-Nazaire, 269
Salamis, 22
Salammbd, 252
San Domingo, 45
San Francisco, 170
San Jose, 126, 128, 131-134,
1 39>

San Salvador, 117, 148, 153
Santa Fe de Bogota. See

Bogota

Santiago, 60, 198
Santiago Railroad, 185
Sargassa Sea, 28
Satyricon, 22

Savana at Trinidad, 47, 51
School of Art, Havana, 201
Scotch in Trinidad, 45
Seneca, Mr., of Le Temps, 187-

i89

Servant question in Panama,

93-94, 157-158
Sonora, 263, 266
Sorbonne, Paris, 276
Soubre, M., 56
Southampton, 43
Spain, 29, 196, 256
Spanish transatlantic boats, 20,

59.
Spanish colonies, 35

Spanish courtesy, 219
Spanish customs, 228
Spies, 108-109
Spinoza, Baruch, 199
Stegomia fasciata, 82-83
Street-arabs, 269-270
Switzerland, 61, 86

Taft, William Howard, 184-

185

Tanagra, 150
Tarantulas, 261
Tehuantepec, Isthmus of, 154
Temps, Le, newspaper, 187-189
Texas adventurers, 2 1 9
Thames, River, 155
Theatre of Panama, 101-103
Tobacco Trusts, 172-173, 185
Torquemada, 224

287

Index

Trafalgar, frigates at, 22
Transatlantic Company, 23
Transvaal, 161
Trinidad, Island of, 32, 34-35,

37. 42, 44, 45. 54
Tsoushima, Battle of, 197
Turkey, 85, 161

U

United Fruit Company, 164
United States, 13, 19, 35, 38

et passim
Upmann, Mr., 171-172

Vampires, 48-49

Vatel, 237

Vedado, Havana, 179

Vegetation, tropical, 45, 128

Velasquez, Diego, 58

Venezuela, 18, 31-54, 60, 80,

281
Venezuela, mines of, 43

Venice, 249

Vera Cruz, 192, 206, 224
Verne, Jules, 181
Versailles, 144
Versailles ; the, 52
Viquez, Gonzales, 159

W

Washington, 13, 16, 68, 184
West Indies, 29-34, 255
Weyler, General, 191-192
White House, Washington, 184
William II, Emperor of Ger-
many, 1 60, 233

I Yaquis, or Apaches, 264
! Yellow fever, 32, 114-115

Yellow House, Trinidad, 51

Yucatan, 260, 266

Zelaya, Senor, 140, 142-144

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